Hi, and Where to start

[Peter "Firefly" Lund]

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, Luke Bigum wrote:

> I know that all this is being developed at the moment, but is there any kind
> of documentation (even a rough draft of an API or something) that could help
> me understand what and how X is doing things? Or am i going to have to read
> code? :-D

Yes, I'm afraid you'll actually have to read code.

There are some helpful people on the IRC channel -- very useful if you
don't know where to start the code reading.

It sounds to me like you really want to write a new compositing manager.
There is currently a standalone compositing manager and a compositing
manager built into the Metacity window manager (from Gnome).  There might
be others, but I have been out of the loop for about two months ;)

Do you know how X works?  I found the old docs by Scheiffler and Gettys
very useful -- you should be able to find postscript versions in for
example the XFree86 4.3 tarballs for both the basic X protocol and xlib.

Or is the problem only the new stuff?  Go look in the mailing list
archives for the kdrive project going back to, say October/November 2003
where the basic ideas for DAMAGE, COMPOSITE and the update to XFIXES were
hashed out.

-Peter