[Xcb] Tasks required in order to fix XCB-based Xlib

Josh Triplett josh.trip@verizon.net
Thu Jan 27 00:17:49 PST 2005


I looked into the current non-working status of the XCB-based Xlib.  It
appears that there are two main issues:

First, there was a minor change to the pkg-config scripts of xcb-proto,
involving the method used to find the protocol descriptions.  The old
method parsed the CFLAGS and looked for -I flags; the new method just
supplies the path to the protocol descriptions as "xcbincludedir".  (For
consistency with automake, perhaps this should be called
"pkgincludedir"?)  This would be a five-minute makefile/configure.ac change.

The far bigger issue is that of the M4 macros and M4 wrapper definitions
used in the Xlib build in order to autogenerate wrappers around many XCB
protocol functions.  There are two possible fixes to this problem.  One
would be to replace the M4 macros with a small XSLT, and the wrapper
definitions with an XML file.  This would require either someone with a
reasonable understanding of what the M4 is doing, or someone who has
sufficient time to delve into it and find out; it would also require
some skills in XSLT, but from a look at the macros, the work required is
probably significantly less than XML-XCB itself.

One issue with this: it may be helpful to share some code with
c-client.xsl for this, to reduce duplication; however, I'm *very*
hesitant to install c-client.xsl in the xcb package, or to allow it to
become any sort of public or well-defined interface.  Suggestions for
solving this issue would be welcome.

Another possible solution would be to grab the last M4 definitions, run
them through the existing Xlib M4 macros, and commit that to the Xlib
repository.  This would be the fastest fix to get things unbroken, and
might still be useful even if we go with the above solution, but it may
be less than ideal in the long run.

In either case, I can certainly work on this issue.  If someone else can
take it on, please let me know; otherwise I'll try to work on it soon.

- Josh Triplett
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