Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU!rws
From: rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bob Scheifler)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: visual depth vs. colormap_size
Message-ID: <8904051353.AA12706@EXPIRE.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: 5 Apr 89 13:53:06 GMT
References: <8904051324.AA23776@decwrl.dec.com>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 17


    If you need to use a non-default colormap, however, you are able to
    allocate 254 and 255.  The theory here is that you are going to screw up
    the colormap anyway so you probably have a good reason for doing it, and
    may well really need the colors.

I would claim this is the wrong thing to do, at least as I understand what
you've said.  You seem to be virtually guaranteeing that image applications
will either have completely bogus cursor colors, or else that image
applications will have specific knowledge of the hardware.  Both scenarios
are bad.  An image application creating its own colormap will likely either use
AllocAll for simplicity (in which case your server must assume the worse and
the cursor will get trashed), or use a standard colormap (which will probably
want to use all 256 entries for maximum shades).

(Also, you aren't "screwing up" the colormap, you're simply choosing another
one.)