Re: [forum] About our effort at NoMachine

[Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com>]

> 6) enough extensions get loaded, with typically at least 2 round trips
> at least to get each going, and maybe 4-5 extensions used
> by the applications (toolkits). We need an extension extension to avoid
> these round trips, (one could just kludge around with a batching call;
> but there are other shortcomings with the extension system,
> like the lack of extension versioning in the framework) that I think
> it is wise to think about a better framework).

What I would love to see in X11 is conditional streams. When you throw
a command at a shell for example you can say

	"Do X, Y, Z , ... "

but also

	Do X, Y, Z, ..."

and bracketed sets of these

	Do  (Do X, Y, Z stopping on fail)  (Do A, B, C stopping on fail)

but stop on a failure. That gives you the ability to do more than just
batching, since you can batch a sequence of commands for the general
case and respond to the failure. My gut feeling (and I've not been
doing analysis unlike you folks) is that this would improve things
immensely for startup

> 7) image transport is a real issue, whether for glyphs or other images.
> This is in part due to image sizes having grown due to greater depth
> (most people have 32 bits/pixel these days). So besides compressing
> glyphs, having the window system able to better
> take images in pretty native formats would be a serious win for alot of
> applications.

It is also due to the inability to do long term caching of images in
the server/on disk _between_ server runs on low bandwidth links

> The trap to avoid here is the XIE slippery slope, and focus on image transport,
> rather than image processing.

Given there are well understood processes for image compression and well
understood processes for lossless pixmap compression why do you say this.
I'm curious ? Do you oppose the ability to send jpeg for example, or the
way XIE kind of grew beyond a way to transport images into a whole 
nightmare of processing features ?