[forum] XFree86 5.0 TODO

[Alan Hourihane]

Well,

As this forum is for discussing all X stuff, here goes with a few notes
from an XFree86 Core Team meeting from a little while back. So in the
spirit of openness I thought I should discuss it here.

This is stuff that we can think of that needs doing for XFree86 5.0, but
by no means is it limited to this list or even guarantee'ing anything
on the list will make it for 5.0.

So, to spark discussions, here it is....

1. Redesign of XAA, so that multiple depth pixmaps can be stored in offscreen
memory and the creation of a new directive - called the XAASurface. There
will undoubtably be driver work involved to port to the new interface. The
techinical lead on this is Mark Vojkovich. I believe Mark has a substantial
portion of this done, if not all.

2. FBManager extensions. This still needs furthur thought to encompass
the requirements of all bases, but, the DRI is one that needs much more
flexible memory management of the framebuffer. Secondly, it's been 
requested before for linear allocation, rather than the current area 
allocation code for some Xv implementations.

3. Xlib locale removal. By removing all the Xlc code from libX11 and see
if we can layer it on top of iconv. Need to discuss the advantages and
disadvantages of such a task.

4. DGA - do we leave in, or do we shelve it ?

5. RandR. We now have rotation support, but not depth switching yet. This
still needs to be done.

6. PseudoColor emulation. Egbert Eich has written some preliminary code
for this, and we're hoping he'll be able to release it soon.

7. Hot Plugging of devices. Displays, Keyboards, Mice. This is obviously
tricky when running multiple Xservers on the same machine. How do you
correlate which device is plugged in, to which Xserver etc. 

8. Multiseat capability. Allowing multiple Xservers to run with independent
graphics cards, keyboards and mice on the same machine.

9. Xc/Xr - A postscript rendering library for the RENDER extension replacing
Xlib drawing routines. 

10. Window translucency.

11. XFixes extension.

12. Gamma corrected RENDER

13. Potential DIX/DDX changes.

Any other topics, please bring up for discussion.

Alan.