Re: XF86 and full-screen graphical console apps

[Johnny Taporg <taporg@yahoo.com>]

Dan Kegel <dank@alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:
>
> Pierre Phaneuf schrieb:
> > This would be just like the idea of Xggi using GGI, but having the
core
> > of XFree86 instead of GGI gives us a lot of already supported and
proven
> > hardware, good acceleration and a lot of configuration tools already
> > done and working for that (creating the XF86Config file).
> 
> Sounds like a GGI FAQ.  "Why reinvent the wheel?"
> Maybe the answer is partly in 
> http://www.mucl.de/Home/ttanner/ggi/ggi-intro.en.html
> where it says Xfree86 is a big monolithic hunk of code.
> Could be it was too hard to break it up.

I'm betting that you're right.  I read something 
somewhere that one of the features of the upcoming
(or recent?) xf86 release was a modular structure,
where a single server sits on video drivers for each
of the different chipsets.

>From that, we can infer that up to now, the xf86 code
was less organized, and splitting out the display
parts would have been difficult.

Additionally, although people might find the
display code useful, I could understand the xf86 dev
team being hesitant to make it an "official" lib.  If
they did, they'd be responsible for maintaining the
API and ensuring backwards compatibility, which is
a restriction that they may not want to deal with.

On the other hand... maybe it's worth asking about
on their mailing list?

Of course, just like svgalib, since it's not in the
kernel, you'll either have to be root to use it, 
unless you make use of some kind of memory visuals.

> On another topic - 
> if you don't use KGI or SVGALIB or X, you can't
> use GGI, right?  GGI requires one of the three, doesn't it?

[checking my config file]
...or glide, or aalib, or a memory target, or an
image file, or fbcon, or tele (? no idea what that
is), or vcsa (? same), plus a number of pseudo-targets
(ie ones that simulate truecolor on 8-bit, or ones 
that split the image up into blocks that render into
separate targets), plus whatever targets you care to
write and add.
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