X at OLS [LWN.net]

X at OLS

Posted Jul 23, 2004 9:07 UTC (Fri) by emlix (guest, #14784)
Parent article: X at OLS

Year by year Keith Packard is brabbing around about what-a-no has to be
done for the X11 server. But down to reality he is still producing
nothing more than adding about 5 undocumented constantly changing X11 protocol extensions on top of a fundamentally broken system without
ever fixing anything else.

1. Why there are still BDF font files around. The X11 server has freetype2
now?

2. Why isn't it possible to change any configuration parameters dynamically?

3. Why do I still always have to kill the server on logout?

4. The new font extensions are still done by people not proficient in other languages then english. They still think it is a good idea to differentiate
between glyph and character. Boys we have unicode and it works.

He is apparently hiling DRI. That's naive. The kernel side of it doesn't
trully look like a UNIX device driver at all. It's not documented and there
are neraly zero chances new drivers will be ever developed using this
interface since apparently the original authors left it orphaned. And indeed there is just a very modest amount of maintainance done on the
kernel side of things here.

X11 is doomed. However it will survive, since CPUs are getting faster and
it's after all still possible to use it as a very complicated frame buffer
substitute.

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X at OLS

Posted Jul 23, 2004 14:29 UTC (Fri) by rjw (guest, #10415) [Link]

You are an idiot.

However:

1. BDF files are being converted to TTF bitmap files.
2. Xorg is being Halified, and the idea is to make all configuration occur automatically via hotplugging, with the users settings only used for override.
3. What? This is the login manager ( xdm, gdm, kdm etc) or just you being stupid. I'll guess the latter.
4. There is no "new font extension". Text rendering has moved client side. So if you *really* want to write your own text rendering, you are welcome to. However, both Qt and Pango have very advanced multilingual rendering capabilities included - so use that. Xft2 is absolutely fine for rendering positioned glyphs - positioning them is the job of higher level libraries. But a convenience api is provided to allow writing Latin1 strings. What a crime!

X at OLS

Posted Jul 29, 2004 7:28 UTC (Thu) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link]

> Boys we have unicode and it works.

No it doesn't. Full unicode support (level 3) is a nightmare to implement. I'd
say almost impossible, it's definately at least as hard as writing a .tiff reader
that implements the entire tiff standard....