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From: garyo@THINK.COM (Gary Oberbrunner)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Why is resouce manager property only set on Screen 0 ?
Message-ID: <8909261901.AA16950@prometheus.think.com>
Date: 26 Sep 89 19:01:11 GMT
References: <8909261831.AA17431@expo.lcs.mit.edu>
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Sorry if this gets to you twice, Jim.  My mailer is not too bright. :-)
    
    You write:
    ...we still think this [dual-screen hack] is more of a bug than
    a feature... this is case of trying not to fall into the trap of
    slapping lots of band-aids on problems that require more serious
    treatment.

        I note:
    	When you open a display you can set the default *screen*, but not the
    	default *visual*.  This seems to me to be a strong indication that
        the resource defaults should be organized along the same lines.
    
    You set the default screen since different physical screens are likely
    to be in different locations (even if side by side).  The logical
    screen hack that David Rosenthal implemented for the cgfour was very
    clever, but as he has argued over and over again, there are much better
    solutions.

Actually my point is independent of David's dual-screen hack.  ANY server
with two screens, whether side-by-side, large and small, color & b/w,
logical or physical, will have this problem.  Servers with a hi-res and a
lo-res screen will have a different variant of the same problem.  And
resolution (I mean width & height in pixels) has nothing to do with
visuals, it's purely a screen issue.  At some point you'll *have* to have
some way of specifying resources on a per-screen basis.  You may also, as
you point out, need per-visual resource specification.  However, the
current Xrdb/XA_RESOURCE_MANAGER method will have difficulty adapting to
per-visual resources, whereas it seems simple and useful to do per-screen
resources now.  After all, you'll need them anyway, because visuals don't
capture some of the variables you might want to conditionalize on (like
screen size).

    Another part of the problem is that the way in which resources are
    located is part of the Xlib standard.  Just changing it in MIT's
    sources isn't enough.  As someone pointed out several days ago (and
    which we've been trying to get people to believe for a long time), MIT
    is just one player (admittedly, one with a very loud mouth :-) in the X
    game.

This is true, but if you take the lead people will follow.  If you claim
that it's too hard to 'do it right' and so you're not going to do
*anything* about it until some later release, then nobody else will either.

					As always,

					Gary O

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