[Xcb] Porting the rest of the X.Org apps to xcb

[Vincent Torri]

On Fri, 16 Jul 2010, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

> Given what I learned on the xwininfo port I took a quick pass across
> the rest of the X.Org app/* modules to see what it would take to port
> each to xcb.
>
> I am *not* volunteering to do these all, just offering some insight into
> which are going to be easier/harder/not possible and hoping that others
> will step up to do some of these.
>
> At least at a quick glance, I think these could be fairly straightforward
> to port to XCB, though whether it's worth the effort for all of them is
> debatable:
>
>    backlight, ico, xcmsdb, xcompmgr, xdriinfo, xhost, xinit, xkill,
>    xrandr, xrdb, xrefresh, xrestop, xsetroot, xshowdamage, xstdcmp,
>    xvinfo, xwd, xwud

Arnaud Fontaine wrote an XCB-based composite manager. Is it necessary to 
port xcompmgr ?

>    rendercheck (Xrender extension test suite - would probably want to
>    		 leave #ifdef'ed so it can still be used to test the
> 		 Xlib-based libXrender API)
>
> These require support for extensions not yet ported to XCB:

Xinput is ported to XCB. It's just not installed by default. On the other 
hand, i don't know its status (that is: why is it disabled by default ?)

Vincent

>    XKB: setxkbmap, xkbcomp, xkbevd, xkbprint, xkbutils, xset
>    Security: xauth
>    DBE: xdbedizzy
>    XF86dga: xf86dga
>    XF86vm: xgamma
>    Xinput: xinput, xsetmode, xsetpointer
>
> and then there's xdpyinfo, which uses all of these not yet in XCB:
>    xf86vm, xf86dga, xf86misc, Xinput, dmx
>
> These depend on libXft, and I'm not sure what to do about that in a xcb
> port:
>
>    x11perf (plus like rendercheck, we'd still want to be able to use it
>    	     to test libX11 for a while)
>
> These depend on XKeysymToString or XStringToKeysym, which last I remember
> was waiting for someone to create a libxkeysym to do the mappings:
>
>    fstobdf, xlsfonts, xmodmap
>
> These depend on libXt and/or libXaw, which use Xlib types like Display
> in their API, so a pure-xcb-port is not possible without first porting to
> another toolkit (which doesn't seem worth the effort for most of these,
> since there already are similar programs for other toolkits, or doesn't
> make sense since they're specifically for Xt resource management):
>
>    Xt resource tools: appres, editres, listres, viewres
>
>    beforelight, bitmap, oclock, proxymngr, smproxy, twm
>    xbiff, xcalc, xclipboard, xclock, xconsole, xditview,
>    xdm, xedit, xeyes, xfd, xfindproxy, xfontsel, xgc, xload,
>    xlogo, xmag, xman, xmessage, xmh, xmore, xsm, xvidtune
>
> These are non-X client utilities that don't use libX11 at all so have no
> calls to convert to xcb:
>
>    font file utilities: bdftopcf, fonttosfnt, mkfontdir, mkfontscale
>    font server utilities: fslsfonts, showfont, xfs, xfsinfo
>    misc utilities: constype, iceauth, rgb, rstart, sessreg, xfwp
>
> Special cases:
>
>    lbxproxy - calls xtrans directly since it's a X11 proxy, plus, it's
>    	     LBX, so it's just special anyway.   (Also, since Xorg no
> 	     longer supports LBX, not widely used anymore.)
>
>    luit - only uses locale.aliases file from libX11, doesn't even need
>    	 to link to libX11.
>
>    mkcomposecache - helper program to build libX11's input method Compose
>    	   table caches - a non-libX11 version makes no sense.
>
>    xcursorgen - mostly uses libXcursor, uses libX11 only for
>    	   XReadBitmapFileDatabitmap, never calls XOpenDisplay
>
>    xev - mostly very simple, except for the interaction with libX11
>       	input methods to display what strings would be input by key events
>
>    xpr - only uses XInitImage from libX11
>
>    xprop - needs better helpers for property encodings (like the discussion
>    	  during the xwininfo port), otherwise should be straightforward
>
>    xrx - Mozilla plugin
>
>    xscope - uses xtrans directly to proxy X protocol, printing it on the
>    	   way for debugging - though it would be nice if extension decoders
> 	   could be xcb-generated instead of handcoded
>
> --
> 	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
> 	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System
>
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