Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!EMU.NCSL.NIST.GOV!colella
From: colella@EMU.NCSL.NIST.GOV (Richard Colella)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso
Subject: Re:  X-WINDOWS & OSI
Message-ID: <8906061752.AA01135@emu.ncsl.nist.gov>
Date: 6 Jun 89 17:52:11 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Lines: 27


	What is going to be the outcome of the impending battle of
	placement of X?  There can be no question of the fundamental
	importance of the inclusion of X in the OSI portfolio, but how
	does it relate to the architectural design?  X requires a
	reliable byte stream environment for operation, any other 'higher'
	issues being dealt with by it's internal design.  This, sensibly,
	dictates that X should be defined as an extended application
	'stack' sitting directly on top of Transport.  The primary
	arguments for this lie clearly in aspects of efficiency - reduced
	overhead in establishment of a window, and in the data
	minimisation over the 'wire' during operation - but this
	will be countered by the fundamentalist argument, i.e. X
	can only be seen within OSI as an application and as such
	must operated via ACSE.

>From the practical side, what you are suggesting is that an appropriate
place for X is directly over transport.  There is some work on X in the
POSIX group that has recently started.  The POSIX folks tend to be
less concerned with architectural purity and more oriented towards
things that work.  Maybe that's the way to achieve the goal of X
in the OSI environment.  People will use what works, not necessarily
what is architecturally pure.  I'm not an architectural purist, so
I won't even try to take that one up.

Regards,
Richard