lack of standardization on X11 (was Re: X Gesture Extension protocol - draft proposal v1)

[Chase Douglas]

On Tue, 2010-08-17 at 18:31 +0300, Tiago Vignatti wrote:
> (starting a new thread to not mess with the things) 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 01:41:17AM +0200, ext Chase Douglas wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> One of the benefits to write any protocol in stone is because a plenty of use
> cases was thought for while, which theoretically could be used by lot of
> application and consumers.
> 
> Everyone knows that we're not using X core protocol anymore and we're abusing
> its extensibility feature. In MeeGo + QT 4.7 we're using around 15% of the
> core protocol only. This all means we can play and juggle with the protocol
> for anyone needs, adding and killing X extensions.
> 
> Now, the major problem is that we start to have a bunch of different
> applications, each one using X differently. Ubuntu 10.10 employing one way to
> do gesture, Ubuntu 11 another one, MeeGo another one and so on. That's silly!
> We should be using the same basis set of system applications instead.
> 
> We're lacking standard.
> 
> 
> > To ensure we have as little protocol incompatibility as possible, we
> > have not published the maverick protocol publicly.
> 
> Chase, I don't think your extension is doing something wrong at all. I'm just
> trying to call some attention about where we're going if we keep doing this
> extension juggling. Something we need to think about.

Yes, this is all one in the same. Our goals are to standardize on a
gesture protocol in X. We hope that can be based on our proposal, but
we're open to other ideas as long as it meets our needs in Ubuntu.

We don't want to be shipping some funky extension to X in Ubuntu that is
Ubuntu-specific and fragments the desktop hierarchy. However, we have to
start somewhere. We can't know what the issues are until we try to
implement an initial version. That's what Ubuntu 10.10 is all about: an
initial implementation to get people excited and help us work out the
kinks. By asking people to base their work on our geis library, we've
attempted to abstract out the X protocol so that we can change it for
the real v1.0 of the gesture extension and not force people to rework
their applications. In theory, no one should be directly using our v0.5
version of the gesture protocol that exists in 10.10.

To give an idea of our timelines, I envision us working a couple weeks
more on the last bits of code necessary to make the gesture stack usable
for 10.10. At that point, the geis API will be considered completely
finalized for major version 1. Then we will transition to helping out
more with the XInput 2.1 extension implementation work, since that's a
dependency of gestures. Finally, we will begin work on the first real
version of the gesture extension proposed here.

I hope that all sounds reasonable :). I really want to encourage
discussions on the protocol itself because we do want one standard for
gestures through X.

Thanks,

-- Chase