Cygwin/X - Development - To-Do List

Last updated: 2003-03-25 1350 EST (Harold L Hunt II)

Following is a list of open tasks on the Cygwin/X project:

Summary	Updated	Description
About: Links to ChangeLog, User's Guide, etc.	2004-03-25	Create an About dialog box that has links to open the ChangeLog (/usr/X11R6/share/doc/XFree86-xserv/changelog.html), /tmp/XWin.log, and, if they are present, the User's Guide, Contributor's Guide, and Frequently Asked Questions using cygwin_conv_to_win32_path() and ShellExecute(). See the cygstart source in the cygutils package if you need a simple example of how to do this.
FatalError Dialog Box	2004-03-25	Change the FatalError message box to a dialog box with links to open the same files described in the About box topic.
Indirect OpenGL acceleration	2004-03-25	Finish implementing the indirect OpenGL acceleration that Alexander Gottwald has nearly completed; there are mostly some rough edges remaining. The notes posted by Harold on 2004-02-29 will be useful. Additional information is in the email that accompanied the above notes.
Automatically assign display number	2004-03-04	Coupled with the detection of in-use display numbers, it would be advantageous if we could optionally automatically assign an unused display number to a new instance of XWin.exe. We would need an IPC mechanism used for all instances of XWin.exe to share information about in-use display numbers, as well as a check of potentially available ports for use by other applications. Finally, this whole thing is useless if we do not have a way to query the started instance of XWin.exe for the display number that it assigned to itself; the ideal solution to this problem will likely require an external executable that has an IPC mechanism to retrieve the desired display number from all running instances of XWin.exe. We may be able to adapt the run.exe utility to query the XWin.exe instance with the same parent process id (should be the command shell that both were started from, I hope) and to then modify the environment being passed to a child process. There may be other ways to solve this problem, but anything that allows for a race between started instances of XWin.exe will be unacceptable, since an error would result in applications attaching to the wrong display.
Detect in-use display number ports	2004-03-04	Display number n in X11 listens on TCP port 6000 + n. As of our X Server release 4.3.0-49 we check for other instances of XWin.exe running on a given display number, but we perform no checks for other applications listening on port 6000 + n. We may not be able to atomically check port 6000 + n and start listening on it if it is not in use, but we can at least perform a sanity check with only a small window where another application could start listening on that port before we started listening on it; this would be a sufficient fix for our purposes. Other developers can help with adding command-line parameters to control this feature once the above code is finished.
Timestamp on log file entries	2004-03-04	Add a timestamp to each line of /tmp/XWin.log, as suggested by Ehud Karni on 2004-03-03. Ehud also provided source code useful for performing such timestamping in his email.
MultiWindow DirectDraw and DirectDraw NL	2004-03-04	Blit updates from a DirectDraw shadow framebuffer to the updated Win32 window instead of blitting from a GDI shadow framebuffer. This should be trivially easy to start and should require only a single DirectDraw surface for the whole screen (I had previously said it would require one surface per Win32 window). It would be very important to just demonstrate that this can be done; clipping the blits to properly handle window z-order and such can be finished by other developers.
Windows display size changes while running	2004-03-04	Use RandR (resize and rotate) to pass changes to the display size (e.g. 1024 x 768 --> 1280 x 1024) to the X Server and all running applications. This should be very easy to do; you can use the code that is in place for detecting display changes and just pass these values to RandR to let it do its thing.
Emulate PseudoColor on TrueColor	2003-09-23	Provide emulation of PseudoColor visuals (typically 8-bit palette-based visuals) on top of the default TrueColor visual (when running in 15, 16, 24, or 32 bit color depths). This will allow a lot of CAD-type applications that require PseudoColor to be run when Windows is in a color mode higher than 8 bits per pixel. The general idea here is to add checks to any copying of data between offscreen and onscreen, as well as between areas on the screen; these checks test for differing visual types and convert the pixels and colors accordingly.
Windows clipboard integration	2004-01-07	Extend xwinclip, the Cygwin/X clipboard manager, to handle data types other than XA_STRING, COMPOUND_TEXT, and UTF8_STRING; for example, BITMAP, PIXMAP, etc.
User's Guide - Document .XWinrc	2003-09-22	Documentation needs to be added to the User's Guide for Earle F Philhower III's .XWinrc mechanism. The documentation source is available via CVS in the 'xoncygwin' project on sourceforge. This task is greatly simplied by the fact that Earle provided comments in his example .XWinrc file.
DirectDraw windowed PseudoColor	2003-08-27	Figure out a satisfactory solution for enabling DirectDraw engines to support PseudoColor visuals when running in 8 bit color modes. DirectDraw reserves the first ten and the last ten colors in each DirectDrawPalette object when running in windowed mode. Therefore, PseudoColor visuals are only supported with DirectDraw engines when running in fullscreen 8 bit color modes.