In the "Removing core support from Xft" discussion back in Dec. 2001,
Marcus Kuhn wrote:
>What's the schedule for getting RENDER into the X11 standard and
>Sun's X servers?
I've spent some time looking into this, and there are a couple of things
that I think are necessary to get this going at both X.org & the other vendors:
1) Draw a line in the sand (say at what's done in XFree86 4.2.0 or 4.3.0)
and declare that to be RENDER 1.0. Either finish the spec, or leave the
transformations and other bits that still aren't defined out until version
1.1 -- just set a stable, complete spec instead of the current unfinished
spec. Agree that future versions will be backwards compatible.
2) Document the API. I can't find any formal documentation of the API,
just the headers/source & the extension protocol documentation. Someone
could probably combine those two into the start of an API spec.
I can't speak for all the commercial vendors, but at least Sun is very
concerned with stable interfaces, as our OS release cycles are now about
2 years long, and while the existing bits of the Render API seem stable, the
documentation says that much work remains to be done and it's unclear if that
includes changes to the existing protocol/API. Since we promise customers that
we only make incompatible changes with prior notice in the next marketing
release (i.e. Solaris 8, 9, 10, not the update releases that come out every few
months), we don't want to be caught adopting RENDER, then finding out that it's
changed incompatibly and we will spend the next three years with an
incompatible version of an extension we added primarily to be compatible with
XFree86. It's much easier for us to add incremental, backwards compatible,
features, than to make wholesale changes to existing features.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Software Systems Group
Cust. Advocacy & Tech Services: X11 Engineering
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