WM & Bit Depth

[<jay pathways sde state sc us>]

I think I misdirected this earlier.  A thousand pardons if you receive it
twice.

--

While were on the subject of what is means to gnomify an app and/or a
window manager, let me offer a couple of thoughts I had recently.  Not
sure how feasible they are, but...

I read on a newsgroup that the reason X does not let you switch bit depths
on the fly was that X apps don't know how to respond to bit depth changes
on the fly.  But let's say we modified standard XFree to change depths on
the fly and pass an event indicate such to the window manager.  The window
manager could then pass this message along to some apps that do know how
to repond to depth changes and suspend an unrealize the ones that don't.
Obviously, this would require some sort of protocol for communicating
depth info between apps and the WM, but that could become a part of gnome.

How off the wall is this?  This would be most useful for games that wanted
a particular color depth, since generally when you're gaming you want to
immerse yourself and don't care if your other windows disappear
temporarily.  I want to play doom without having to restart my X server.

Jay 

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