Re: Tales of GNOME and DRI

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"Terry 'Mongoose' Hendrix II" <stu7440 westga edu> writes:

> I've noticed that since DRI buffers can't be captured by xwd and etc,
> that it's hard making screenshots of gtk/gnome apps using a direct
> rendering context.  I currently make an xwd screenshot and then hand
> bltt my gl buffer ss into it.
> 
> I talked to some other gl and gtk developers about this and they seem to
> do the same.  I was about to either write an internal method to:
> 
>     1. Capture GL framebuffer
>     2. Disable the context
>     3. Capture X root
>     4. Bltt them into a compositse screeshot
> 
>     OR
> 
>     Break a lot of security by providing a way to share a GL buffer and
>     try to do the rest ouside the appilcation.  Like a glxwd that 
>     required special hooks per program.
> 
> I've talked to other development teams that would also like this.  I'm
> new to GTK/GNOME as many of you know, and I was wondering if their was a
> better way.  Can't we have an event or something for such buffer
> requests to make this cleaner?  I use gtk glarea and gnome, while some
> other projects like Gtk Raidiant use gtk and gtkgl. ( Well, gtkq3r uses
> a custom widget that's nearly the same. )  I want this to work at least
> for these gtk+gl applications.
> 
> Anyone have suggestions on where this code should go?  In gtk, the
> widgets, or use msg passing?  

I don't really see how this is relevant to GTK+ ... I suppose GTK+
_could_ have some sort of ::screenshot_yourself signal on GtkWidget
but that seems highly inappropriate.

I'm not clued into the issues involved here, but it seems to me more
appropriate to put any hooks needed here actually into the DRI
infrastructure. Trying to attack the problem of say, making a
screenshot including multiple OpenGL from the toolkit or application
side seems jury-rigged and probably quite unreliable.

Regards,
                                        Owen