Re: a wishlist [Re: getting things moving]
- From: ozan s yigit <oz@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: wilyfans@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 10:06:21 -0400
Tor <tor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
| On 2003-08-01 CE ozan s yigit wrote,
| > * determination and fix of capslock bug. i suspect a subtle semantics bug
| > somewhere in the libXg, but hard to tell. bug is manifested on anything
| > that uses libXg on *bsd/linux platforms vis a vis xfree86. does not
| > show on solaris
| >
| > * libXg et al. changes for properly anti-aliased fonts, in keeping with
| > plan9 implementation as much as possible. must run on solaris, linux
| > and *bsd with minimal number of extra packages.
| >
| > * libXg/libframe/et al. code cleanup.
| Speaking as the author of the Xft patch, I have given some thought to
| updating the graphics and X11 bits to support colors, antialiased fonts
| and double buffering (no flickering when scrolling).
|
| I would do this as a complete rewrite, scrapping the existing libXg.
| The core wily code would use libframe and a handful graphics calls to
| draw the scrollbars, borders and boxes. The input event loop would also
| need rewriting, since I do not want to use Xt.
Tor, thank you for the note and the offfer to implement a new API.
The reason libXg is around is that it replicates the (earlier) plan9
graphics API under X. this was thought to be important at one time, and
it allowed many thousands of vi and emacs-sick programmers to switch to
sam, and made wily possible. I realise it is showing its age, but
more than one program (some not distributed) depend on it. If that API
needs to be scrapped, I would be interested in the new plan9 graphics API.
Are you suggesting that those improvements cannot be done under an API
(http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/man/2/INDEX.html) that closely resembles
it, and it has to be completely scrapped? I'm not worried about changing
wily (and a number of other programs) I just not sure if a brand-new API
(admittedly you have not given a specification so i'm making some
assumptions) is really justified.
I cc'ed this message to russ cox to see what the situation is with the
plan9 graphics library under different platforms; i know some pieces have
been running under windows and X, and it is a matter of time before acme
is available under linux and windows using probably a variant of libXg.
| I am willing to spend some time on this, but only if it will be part of
| the mainline wily distribution. Let me know what you think.
I think before you do any work, I need to find out what we can get out
of plan9 guys. If they have already done the work, and provides us with
the facilities we need for wily, the problem is more or less solved.
| > * adopting newly released plan9 libraries (eg. libfmt) where possible,
| > *except* the regex library. [this regexp library is special, see
| > below]
|
| I tried a compile with the newly released plan9 libutf and encountered
| no problems. libfmt is only used in one place in wily for one error message..
great, re: libutf.
oz
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