[Xcb] xlibs --with-xcb unbroken

[Jamey Sharp]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2005 at 10:29:44AM +0100, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> Jamey Sharp wrote:
> >The ListFontsWithInfo request in the X protocol is quite unusual, in a
> >way that makes it difficult to implement. As a result, neither XCB nor
> >the XCB-based Xlib currently support it. We have a plan for fixing that,
> >and a fix in Xlib is pretty clearly necessary, but so few applications
> >use that request that it hasn't been a high priority for me. In fact, I
> >can only think of three applications with this problem.
> 
> Any application using Xt is affected, so both xcalc and xclock crash
> as well as many other legacy applications distributed with X.

Um... Are you sure? Aren't xterm and Acrobat Reader both Xt users? I
haven't had any problems like this with either of those. I've tested
with Netscape Communicator 4 on Sparc Solaris, too, so I think we have
decent Motif coverage as well.

The only apps I knew of that use ListFontsWithInfo are xlsfonts and
xfontsel, IIRC. If just token demo apps don't work, I have a really hard
time caring.

> >Try fdclock instead. It's prettier and should work just fine. ;-)
> 
> Yes, works fine and it looks pretty as usual.  Even kcalc and
> gcalctool do.

Yeah, the modern toolkits seem fine. They should all be using Xft
anyway, making this problem *really* obsolete.

I believe you'll find that even big apps like Mozilla and OpenOffice.org
have little trouble on Xlib/XCB, and neither do the apps that use
special features of Xlib, like the various display managers (xdm et al).

> >BTW, xterm is usually installed SGID and so ignores LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It
> >sounds like you may actually be installing your newly-built libX11
> >rather than using LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but I've often been confused by that,
> >so I thought I'd point it out. When in doubt, of course, `ldd` is your
> >friend.
> 
> Thank you, I were actually setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but I've just verified
> that xterm really works when ran as root.  I can't overwrite my libX11 until
> I get the XCB version to work with basic applications.

Heh. Yeah, I don't blame you. :-) Actually, I don't recommend
"overwriting" your existing libX11 at all: I just edit /etc/ld.so.conf
to list the directory with Xlib/XCB before the directory with an
official libX11.

For what it's worth, Xlib/XCB is not currently completely stable. We
keep seeing occasional assertion failures, and there may well be more
subtle bugs. I spent a long time trying to track them down, but got
frustrated and went off to do something else. Josh has gotten to the
point where he can reproduce the tests I was doing and the bugs I was
seeing, so I guess we're back to trying to fix things.

If you want to help, either in tracking down unknown bugs or fixing the
known ones, that would be great. Let us know how we can help you.

--Jamey