X compression techniques (was Re: VNC server based on kdrive using damage extension?)

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Egbert Eich wrote:

> > So what?  How does that software in any way contribute to the 
> > development of xserver, kdrive, or any future X development?
> > 
> > Simple answer:  It doesn't.
> > 
> > If you want to use their solution, by all means go right ahead, 
> > and if their product built on top of it is whippy-snappy for you, 
> > fantastic.  Jump up and down screaming how great it is.
> > 
> > That does not in any way benefit or affect the development of the 
> > X Window System at all, and as such, whatever merits that 
> > software may or may not have for you or others, it is useless to 
> > the purposes of this mailing list, or for the future development 
> > of the X Window System.
>
>It will become interesting once one thinks about integrating this
>technology directly into the client lib/Xserver. It contains a lot 
>of good ideas to reduce the traffic and especially the round trips 
>on the wire.
>
>After reaching an almost unanimous consent that lbx is more or less
>useless (the author himself claims it's entirely useless) all we are
>left with right now is doing wire compression by going thru ssh.
>Other plans exist to reduce wire round trips however from all what
>I know about NX's solution it is doing a lot more - like persistent
>caching of pixmaps even between X sessions.
>
>Kurt's email may have been written a little bit from a salesperson's 
>point of view, but that doesn't negate the idea behind this software.

I don't discount that the methods used in NX to accomplish it's 
goals are good ideas.  Rather, I think that they are rather good 
ideas, which should be investigated more closely.

However the NX implementation itself is not useful as GPL source 
code to those working on X11 under an MIT license.

The usefulness of the software or the methods it uses to
accomplish it's goals are not what I'm bringing into question
however.  I'm just stating that the proprietary software
component built on top of it might be useful to some end users
out there as a solution, but that doesn't help the development
of improvements of X11 itself.  The GPL license of NX makes it's 
own source code incompatible with being used directly in an X11 
implementation unless the authors of the implementation want to 
make their X11 GPL licensed.

So while there are indeed things to be learned from NX, I don't 
consider it to be a godsend to X developmental issues, while it 
may indeed be fantastic for end users at this point.

I also agree with the tenet that LBX is obsolete and useless.


-- 
Mike A. Harris