Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU!mouse
From: mouse@LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Simple programming quiz
Message-ID: <8906250311.AA20422@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Date: 25 Jun 89 03:11:23 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 27

>> Sure, you can write a program that pops up a window and starts
>> drawing, but what happens when the window becomes obscured and then
>> unobscured?

> Well, if X was a "real windowing system" (tm eddie caplan) the server
> would recover the image from backing store (off-screen bitmaps,
> whatever).

> Unfortunately X suffers from the Macintosh Syndrome... we'll make
> cuts in the capability of the system to cram it into inadequate
> hardware and worry about paying for it (in programmer time, poor
> matches to adequate hardware, and so on) later on.

If it bothers you that much, just give your windows a backing-store
hint of Always, or WhenMapped, or whatever your notion of a "real
windowing system" provides, and then document that it won't work
properly with servers that don't support "real windowing system"
backing-store semantics.  After all, if X required such things, your
program wouldn't run at all with such machines (they wouldn't havve
*any* server), so you haven't lost any potential usefulness....

What's the problem?

					der Mouse

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