From: Steve Cheng <elmert@ipoline.com>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1998 18:42:16 -0400 (EDT)

Re: target-specific info?

On Mon, 21 Sep 1998, Neal Tucker wrote:

[...]
> GGI_DISPLAY=
> "tile:0,256,1024,768,(fbdev:/dev/fb0):1024,0,1280,1024,(fbdev:/dev/fb1)"
> 
> because your monitors are set up like this (forgive the ASCII art):
> 
>                         ----------------
>                         |              |
>              -----------|              |
>              |          |      fb1     |
>              |   fb0    |              |
>              |          |              |
>              -----------+---------------
>                  ----         ----
> 
> Now, you obviously don't want your window manager auto-placing a small
> window up above the fb0 display, since you'll never find it, even if
> you know it's up there.  And you don't want a little error message to
> come up on the boundary right between the monitors either (as I used
> to see all the time with the dual-headed display driver hack on NT4.
> The two monitors were the same size, and it would center the error on
> the "screen", resulting in it spanning the 3-inch gap between the
> actual display areas so that it was hard to read.  Very annoying.).
> 
> So my question is: Is this the type of thing that the application (Xggi)
> would query of the target using ggiGetAPI?  If not, is there some other
> obvious place to put this sort of thing?

This isn't really possible, for obvious reasons: that a program 
shouldn't be aware of what target it is running, and it's target-specific.

I suggest passing the display-string to the Xserver itself (i.e. not
GGI_DISPLAY) and let it do it's own parsing.  But then it can
get quite complicated.

Or, generically, maybe LibGGI should support non-rectangular modes, e.g.
your union of the two differently-sized framebuffers.  But I can already
hear screams of 'put it into an LibGGI extension!' :-)

I would be nice if some future GUI could allow the user to just graphically
select which areas to display on which monitor or duplicate them
(display-multi) on-the-fly.  So you really do need some sort of extension to
query and set these things which attaches to any visual which is capable of
'multiple-display'.  Just dreaming...

--
Steve Cheng

email: steve@ggi-project.org
www: <http://shell.ipoline.com/~elmert/>;