Re: status?

[jg pa dec com (Jim Gettys)]

> From: Matthias Ettrich <ettrich@troll.no>
> Resent-From: wm-spec-list@gnome.org
> Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2000 20:30:18 +0100
> To: wm-spec-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: status?
> -----
> On Sun, 09 Jan 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Is there a feeling that people are happy with the spec? Any final
> > additions? I noticed a few comments in the archives since the last
> > draft, but not too much traffic.
> 
> Did we decide what to do with the property packing?
> Originally we intented to pack everything regarding client windows into one
> big,
> extensible property to avoid roundtrips to the server.
> 
> Somebody mentioned that it's just a few lines X-lib hacking to be able to read
> several property in one roundtrip, so we better keep it simple.
> 

It was me...  It isn't all that hard to write Xlib routines to "do the
right thing" in a single round trip (you might claim I'm biased, having
written Xlib in the first place).  I have evidence on my side, however,
there having been significant X extensions written over the years.

There are things I'd do differently if I had them to do over again, so
handling errors is more of a problem than it might be, but it isn't all
that difficult.

Possibly the best example of doing this sort of batching is
in the routine XInternAtoms, in the file xc/lib/X11/IntAtom.c in an
X distribution: interning atoms became a Xt toolkit bottleneck, and so
this routine was added (and Xt reworked) to let you Intern a bunch of
atoms in one round trip.  XInternAtoms is between one or two pages of code.

				- Jim

--
Jim Gettys
Technology and Corporate Development
Compaq Computer Corporation
jg@pa.dec.com