[Xorg] ARGB visuals from Composite extension

[John McCutchan]

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 17:52, Keith Packard wrote:
> 
> I did hack the Xserver to make the RGB->pixel conversion routines mask in 
> appropriate alpha bits, and fixed Gdk to do the same, so applications 
> using either of those two mechanisms actually end up working correctly.
> 
> And, we could hack the compositing manager to ignore alpha bits for some 
> windows easily enough.
> 
> The real problem here is that Flash assumes that Mozilla selects the ARGB 
> visual, when in fact it appears to avoid it somehow.  The result is that 
> Flash crashes all of mozilla, which is pretty harsh.  That's independent 
> of how that visual is used within the system.

Both of those are bugs in mozilla and flash.

Composite is experimental, users of it should expect things to break.

You shouldn't be hacking around application bugs in composite.  I say we
let mozilla and macromedia know of the bug (They should already, I
remember reading about this bug a LONG time ago). 

In the kernel world, if the kernel changes in a valid way and breaks
apps Linus doesn't introduce some hack to fix it. He tells the app
authors to fix their bugs -- and rightly so.

I think this comes down to who is the leader? X.org or macromedia (could
be any program/company)? 

Who sets the rules?

John