Re: [AD] some additions to DGA driver

[Shawn Hargreaves <shawn@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Eric Botcazou <botcazou@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> IMHO, centering the DGA screen is an interesting feature but I don't
> like the second one very much: what's then the difference between the
> windowed and the fullscreen mode ? Why then to bother with a windowed
> driver ?

DGA isn't a windowed driver: if you want that, you should be using the 
normal X mode. DGA is always fullscreen, because as soon as you enable 
it, that suspends all other programs. If you don't clear the screen you 
can still see where they used to be, but they aren't still updating that 
screen area, and you can't tab across to them or send them any input, so 
I don't think this will ever count as a useful windowed mode.

Originally the DGA windowed driver only existed because we didn't have 
any fullscreen code. Now we kept it because some people might not be able 
to use the real fullscreen mode, if they don't have their X server 
configured for the right video modes, and because it can be useful for 
debugging, to see all your offscreen video memory to the right and below 
the program window. But the fullscreen DGA mode is normally much better, 
and that is what gets chosen by default.

> If you don't want to see the Allegro's window on the top-left corner of
> the screen, why not to consider the approach I followed in an earlier
> patch I posted on the list ?

I just don't understand why this would be useful: IMHO it's only annoying 
to have to manually position the window before you can run the program 
(and inconsistent since that is going to be different to how people 
normally do that with their window manager), and I don't see why it would 
be useful to have the rest of the screen left visible, since you still 
can't actually _do_ anything in those other programs! Maybe you could 
explain a specific situation of why you wanted that behaviour?

The way it seems to me, people know what to expect when they see a 
program running in a window (X) or fullscreen (DGA). They would get very 
confused if they see something run in only part of the screen, but are 
unable to go on using the programs that are visible in other parts of the 
screen: to me, that just seems unprofessional, and not useful at all. I 
know that if I saw a program do that, I would probably think it was a 
bug. Since the unused screen areas aren't really active, it seems much 
cleaner to black them out rather than just leaving them covered with 
garbage...



-- 
Shawn Hargreaves - shawn@xxxxxxxxxx - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/
"A binary is barely software: it's more like hardware on a floppy disk."