Using OpenGL as a window manager

[Gian Filippo Pinzari]

Martijn Sipkema wrote:
> The X server should do no more than to allow multiple clients to
> use the graphics hardware simultaneously. Higher level abstraction
> can be done on the client side.

This is an interesting point of view and I would like to hear
the opinion of the other readers of this list. Thanks for point-
ing it out, anyway. I worried that my post could be considered
off-topic and I'm glad to see that it was not.

X is much more than a fast method for letting multiple clients
access the framebuffer and we should all leverage its strength.
Nothing prevents clients from just reverting to X for mouse and
pointer handling and using PutImage to draw on the screen. This
would be like sending a PNG of a web page. It would give users
an exact match of what the author intended, but it would not be
the web anymore.

Higher level abstraction -can- be done on the client side, but
the question is "why". Adding such a layer of abstraction for
the sake of redoing things that would be better done into the X
server is a bad idea. IMHO the best way to overcome X protocol
limitations is improving the X protocol.

If you think that a completely different X server can be designed
to better handle the different needs of future graphics, I can
agree with you (even if I don't see why it couldn't be done in
the existing framework), but we must avoid the error of looking
at the X protocol from two incompatible positions. I see X as a
network protocol and an efficient way of enabling distributed
computing. I'm sure that's not your case, but many see X as a
legacy inheritance and would like to see it reduced to a compa-
tibility layer.

/Gian Filippo.