From: Neal Tucker <ntucker@vax.area.com>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1998 16:47:31 -0700

Re: target-specific info?

Steve Cheng says:
> 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.

Yeah, this is what I was pondering.  It sort of breaks the "this is
a single display *as far as you can tell from your point of view*"
model.  However, it's sort of necessary to the application, since
I should know that when I draw to certain parts of the screen, it
really can't ever be seen.  And it could be done in a way in which
if the app doesn't care, it can just pretend the visual is a rect.
 
> 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.

Yes, plus this is ugly because then the app (the Xserver) needs to
know about all types of targets that might stick multiple other
targets together.  (conceivably, tile isn't the only one...)
 
> 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.

Yes, I was thinking about this.  I don't think it would be too hard.
(put up a screen on a single visual which allows the user to arrange
rectangles and assign targets to them, and when they hit OK, it
generates a display-tile: string).  Like the mac Monitors control
panel, only better.

By the way, has anyone noticed that display-tile wigs out if you make
the dimensions too big? :-)  Try a 2x2 array of 640x480 display-X's.

-Neal Tucker