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From: km@mathcs.emory.edu (Ken Mandelberg)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Asking for Backing Store
Message-ID: <1991Feb13.123450@mathcs.emory.edu>
Date: 13 Feb 91 17:34:50 GMT
References: <1991Feb5.191434@mathcs.emory.edu> <5262@awdprime.UUCP>
Sender: news@mathcs.emory.edu
Reply-To: km@mathcs.emory.edu (Ken Mandelberg)
Organization: Emory University, Dept of Math and CS
Lines: 46

In article <5262@awdprime.UUCP>, sanders@peyote.cactus.org (Tony Sanders) writes:
|> In article <1991Feb5.191434@mathcs.emory.edu> km@mathcs.emory.edu writes:
|> >Is there a way from the outside to get a client to request backing store,
|> >or at least for a server to think it has. It seems to me that a user may
|> If the people who wrote your server were nice enough to provided backing
|> store then it might be the case that they provided a X command line
|> argument to force backing store.
|> 
|> For you RS/6000 users out there: X -bs -wm  (enable bs and WhenMapped)
|> Others might try: X -help  or somesuch
|> to get a usage message and see if it helps.
|> 
|> You may find that forcing backing store makes things slower rather than
|> faster because it can be faster to repaint simple stuff rather than
|> store it way all the time when you don't need to.
|> 
|> good luck
|> -- sanders@peyote.cactus.org

It seems to me that forcing the server to use backing store for all clients
is not generally what you want (exept maybe for an X terminal with a serial
link).

At the other extreme, expecting individual clients to figure out how fast
their communications link is and requesting backing store also seems
unlikely. They may abstractly know if they are doing the kind of graphics
that is easier to regenerate then save, but not the communications details
of the particular invocation.

I would argue you that the user who knows something about where he is running
the client, should be able to selectively force request backing store from
the server independent of the internal logic of the client. 

I'm a little surprised that this hasn't been built into the toolkit
initialization routines, so that the user could request it on a per
client basis by a property or command line argument. Alternately, window
managers could allow a user to flag a particular window to the server for
backing store even while its running.  

Is none of this around?

-- 
Ken Mandelberg      | km@mathcs.emory.edu          PREFERRED
Emory University    | {rutgers,gatech}!emory!km    UUCP 
Dept of Math and CS | km@emory.bitnet              NON-DOMAIN BITNET  
Atlanta, GA 30322   | Phone: Voice (404) 727-7963, FAX 727-5611