X Gesture Extension protocol - draft proposal v1

[Chase Douglas]

On Tue, 2010-08-17 at 09:05 +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 1:13 AM, Chase Douglas
> <chase.douglas at canonical.com> wrote:
> >
> >                            The X Gesture Extension
> >                                  Version 1.0
> 
> Are you shipping v1 in Ubuntu already? if so how are you going to deal
> with incompatible v1 if someone thinks X.org should ship with this.

We're shipping with what I would call 0.5 in Ubuntu 10.10. This protocol
proposal is a result of the issues we found in our current
implementation.

To ensure we have as little protocol incompatibility as possible, we
have not published the maverick protocol publicly. There are currently
only two projects using the protocol: utouch-gesturetest and
utouch-geis. We implemented the protocol by copying the code generation
utilities from XCB into the source packages. We then created a protocol
XML file detailing our protocol for 10.10. Thus, we have no avenue to
access the X gesture protocol in Maverick except through gesturetest,
which is just a small test utility, and geis, which provides a cleaner,
nicer abstraction of the protocol.

Of course we have no problem with anyone poking around in our sources,
but we have made every attempt to keep people from using the X protocol
implementation directly in 10.10. We hope to be able to support the geis
API as it stands today in a backwards compatible manner when the full
gesture extension is implemented. Thus, anyone using geis in 10.10 won't
be left with a mess when the underlying protocol changes in 11.04.

For those curious, the code for gesturetest and geis can be found at:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~utouch-team/utouch-gesturetest/1.x/files
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~utouch-team/utouch-geis/1.x/files

Thanks,

-- Chase