Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!ncar!boulder!stan!garya
From: garya@stan.com (Gary Aitken)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: special server mechanism (deemed unnecessary)
Message-ID: <290@stan.com>
Date: 8 Dec 88 18:15:06 GMT
Organization: Solbourne Computer Inc., Longmont, Co.
Lines: 27


    It's the same old (tired) argument about resource id allocation being
    a client responsibility, there's no a priori id to assign to it, it
    would require special mechanism (deemed unnecessary) to assign an id
    to it.

I think this statement needs to be examined a bit.  The "special mechanism"
required in the server concentrates a well bounded problem in a single
place.  The alternative, in the case for all quantities which can be set
but cannot be retrieved, is for every client ever written to stand on its
head to keep track of extra information.  If we were talking about a world
of clients which were not supposed to cooperate with one another, that's
possibly (but I doubt it) justifiable.  But in the X world, where cooperation
among clients is  encouraged, it makes no sense at all.

It seems to me that one should add the capability to retrieve any
quantity which can be set as soon as possible.  Otherwise, you are requiring
untold hundreds (thousands? millions? well...) of programmers, now and in
the future, to drag around extra baggage because of a deficiency in the
server.

Furthermore, all servers are required to supply at least one font.  Presumably
this is the "default".  Why can't the server allocate an id for it just like
it does for other clients?  Consider the server itself client #0.  At server
start up, the server should allocate all of the default id's (font, gc, etc).
Whenever a client makes a connection, automatically grant it the default
set of id's, to which it appends its own private ones.  Doesn't this already
happen anyway, at least to some extent, when one references XDefaultGC(dpy,scn)?