[Mesa3d-dev] Re: using OpenGL to implement a window manager

[Allen Akin]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 05:33:27PM -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
| I think there are four choices:
| ...

There are more, depending on the level of underlying hardware support
you want to require (or simulate).

For example, a few months ago I suggested that the window system could
generate a vertex-program subroutine that returns the partial
derivatives of the window-to-screen transformation at any vertex.  This
is enough information for a transformation program supplied by the
client to tesselate however it would like.  Everything's sharp, no
display lists are required, and tessellation policy is kept out of the
server.

You'd need to think hard about the representation you pass to the server
(perhaps convex primitives bounded by a fixed number of splines) and
several other issues that I haven't thought through.  But this is the
kind of approach that's open to you if you design for a programmable
graphics system.

Allen