Help with my post-SOC project

["Pascal Schoenhardt" <stoanhart gmail com>]

Hi everyone,

My name is Pascal Schoenhardt. I was meant to add RandR1.2 support to
gnome during the summer for Google Summer of Code.

Unfortunately, my project is not complete. It was more difficult than
I thought it would be. By the time I had started to get the hang of
coding in C, using GLib, and learning about the GNOME code base, the
summer was already half way over. Another problem, I believe, is that
I tried to do a lot myself. I never discussed things to any great
detail with my mentor (mainly just asked him for help on technical
things), and I never reached out to the community.

I feel bad that I have not yet delivered on my promise, and am
determined to continue working on it. Unfortunately, with school on, I
am already incredibly busy. I can squeeze in some work, but I am
finding it hard to get motivated, mainly because I am stuck. I will
describe the problem below. With this post, I am looking for anything.
Suggestions, comments, criticisms, ANYTHING to get me going again.
Here goes:

One of the primary features of the new display config capplet was to
provide a) support for profiles, and b) to have GNOME react to display
changes automatically (ie: apply predefined profiles for known display
devices). For these two things to be possible, it needs to be possible
to identify display devices.

The main problem, quite simply, is this: when EDID information is not
available for whatever reason, how can I identify a screen? If a
screen can't be identified, what is to be done? Disable profiles and
autoresponse? Save configurations to xorg.conf like in the past?

The other problem (though this will disappear in time), how do I
handle non-xrandr1.2 video drivers? The XRandR API has a call to test
whether the XRandR 1.2 is present in X, but this will be present even
if the drivers don't support it. The idea was to just fall back on the
old tool, but I need a way to determine whether the drivers supports
XRandR.

That is all for now. The idea here is just to get discussion going...
I am hoping that is enough to get me working on this again!

Thanks everyone,

Pascal