Re: [forum] protocol enhancements

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David Dawes wrote:
On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 07:23:28AM -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
Both Gtk and X11 are going to break horribly in the next few years and
there is going to be a need for X.org, XFree or someone to actually fix
the standards to allow over 65535 pixels width and height. Otherwise you
are not going to be able to run X11 on your walls or on ultra fine
resolution displays.

Absolutely, and I'm glad to see someone else thinking about future hardware/technology. This is an issue I've been trying to get some traction on internally, but it has been difficult. For example, the responses I get (from Jim and Keith in particular) are like "that's not relevant, and won't be for 5-10 years", and "it will break the protocol", etc. That's very short-sighted. Xinerama with enough high-res screens can come close today (I can never remember if the limit is 32767 or 65535). I'm sure that there'll be other issues exposed as we start working towards this. I'd like to see at a minimum that the X server internals, and any proposed re-writes thereof in the context of 5.0, are prepared for this and for deeper and non-integer pixel types. I also think that bumping the protocol minor revision should be explored as a backward-compatible mechanism for enhancing the core protocol. For those who don't know, the X11 protocol has a so-far unused provision for a client/server protocol handshake, and this type of detail can be embedded in Xlib. There's no need to go to "X12" to do this, or to keep tacking on miscellaneous extensions to deal with what are core protocol issues.

We've discussed this as well in the X group at Sun - both the need for sub-pixel resolution (Sun ships several frame buffers that supersample the pixel space already and store images at subpixel resolutions) and for a larger coordinate space (I know Xprint isn't that popular, but we use it in Solaris, and if you're driving a 2400 DPI printer, you're limited to a 13-inch square paper size unless you move the origin).

--
	-Alan Coopersmith-      alan.coopersmith@sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc.   -   Sun Software Group
	 Quality, Integration, & Customer Success (QICS)
	 Platform Globalization Engin. - X11 Engineering



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