Todd T. Fries writes: > I have wishes for the future of XFree86 that I believe I am incapable of > implementing; perhaps with some coaching and luck at finding free time may > change that, but suffice it to say I am responding to the call for future > desires of X. > > Future direction I personally would like to see: > > - lower memory footprint Unfortunately this doesn't coincide with the call for more features. The memory footprint is not entirely under the control of the Xserver. A lot of it is caused by applications which load incredibly many incredibly large pixmaps to the server they probably never need. Smarter applications can reduce the size of the server considerably. The memory footprint displayed by most tools is not the amount of memory consumed from your main memory. Memory mapped framebuffers and registers are also shown. > - more optional modules/protocols A lot of modules are optional. You can remove them from the Modules section in your config file and you don't see them. > - grandfathering of old protocol support, perhaps via an 'old' module, to > assist on the above Noone has any intention to drop support for the core X protocol. It doesn't hurt anybody, you have a lot of applications still using it. You need part of it for the 'new' extensions. Most old extensions are optional and don't get loaded. > - more effort at bringing 'legacy' drivers from 3.3.6 to 4.x This is difficult. The right thing would be to port them. > - support for IPv6 > - no change in license terms (free for all, including Keith to do his own > thing) > > I believe Keith Packard's kdrive does the first two (are there > _any_ plans to support IPv6 in X?). Yes, there are! In fact this was discussed, too on the meeting. There are some more open issues but I'm the wrong one to comment. > > I would like to thank everyone for their hard work on X that has brought > us to this point. Without it, many of us may not even be interested in > UNIX as a desktop + server os. > Thanks! Egbert.