Re: WM & Bit Depth

[raster redhat com]

On 22 Jan, jay@pathways.sde.state.sc.us shouted:
->  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

true. there is no event mechanism for bit depth change.

->  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.

why the wm? X can just send that event to every client ID (like
XClientMessage events).

->  How off the wall is this?  This would be most useful for games that wanted

Very. You are changing the X11 standard to do this.. and 100% of all
apps currently would not survive a bit depth change. Everything you
run would have to be rewritten. I mean everything. It could be done via
an extension to signal a change, then the Xserver changes depth and
issues depth change events..... and you'd have to add a standard that
the root window can change size. Currently its assumed that the root
window never changes size.

->  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.

How about people just write better code and make it run in
1,4,8,12,15,16,24 and 32bpp? Thats a much better solution. I wrote imlib
just for this purpose.. so I dont need to know what bitdepth you are
running... It figures it out and does its best to make things look
decent.

-- 
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