Re: X11 source code: structure, building
Re: X11 source code: structure, building
- Subject: Re: X11 source code: structure, building
- From: Ben Byer <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:21:33 -0800
On Nov 6, 2007, at 8:53 AM, Nathaniel Gray wrote:
On Nov 6, 2007 3:44 AM, Ben Byer <email@hidden> wrote:
If anyone is still reading at this point, I'd be happy to answer any
questions.
I'll bite. The more serious problems with the current X server have
to do with window management. Windows don't get raised, we have
problems with spaces, etc. Why isn't the OS X window manager taking
care of these things for us? Why are we responsible for so much of
our own window management?
I am trying to resolve these issues, but to answer the more general
question -- it's because Xquartz looks like a single application with
many subwindows rather than many separate applications, so we have
"fake" a lot to get it to work correctly.
For example, it looks like the bug where you can't move X11 windows to
a new Space by dragging them to the edge of the screen is a bug in
Spaces. The same behavior is seen with Stickies, or anything that
doesn't have a real titlebar for each window. (Ours are drawn on by
Xplugin.)
Also, I was poking around at gitweb.freedesktop.org and came across
the xquartz-composite branch.
<http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=xorg/xserver.git;a=shortlog;h=xquartz-composite
>
Did you make any progress on this? Is it a sensible way to approach
the X server on OS X? I ask because I was already thinking that this
could be a great way to do an X server on OS X, since the WM is
already basically structured this way.
I took a stab at this, but didn't make too much progress. The idea
there is that Keith Packard thinks we'd be better off replacing all of
the rootless (miext/rootless) code with code based on the Composite
extension. If our goal is to get down to as little OS X / Darwin-
specific code as possible, that would be a good way to do it.
Unfortunately, it will require a lot of rewriting code, and is not
something I feel comfortable tackling with so many outstanding bugs.
That said, you can actually build and run the latest xserver-master
branch on OS X, and it runs some simple apps (xeyes, xterm), but
anything more crashes it, and it crashes it inside the rootless code
(in several different places). At some point, it makes more sense to
put time in to switching to Composite rather than rewriting rootless.
Ben Byer
CoreOS / BSD Technology Group, XDarwin maintainer
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