13 Sep
2017
13 Sep
'17
8:43 a.m.
On 09/12/2017 06:56 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
Wow, big topic. Rather than getting into it in detail
at the moment I'm curious
as to why you think that it's important for it to work over a network.
I personally really like the ability to SSH to a machine (*) using -XY
and run Oracle's installer such that it's display shows up on my notebook.
I find that SO MUCH EASIER than trying to get the iDRAC / RSA / IMM /
etc to work. Usually they require multiple ports and protocols (often
UDP, which is a pain through SSH).
For me, X11 forwarding just works. - Thank you to everyone that spent
so much time and energy getting it to work.
Before you bite my head off for that question,
I'm not suggesting that there's
no value in taking data from somewhere on a network and using it on a local
machine.
I think there's a distinct and large difference in data and display I/O.
Back in the darker ages of the Green Flash (Tektronix
storage tubes like the
4014) it was common to display remote data on a local system. The data in
those days arrived via RS-232. Depending on the application, one could shovel
4014 commands over the wire or just raw data and use a local program to generate
drawing commands.
I've often contemplated SIXEL graphics in an error prompt from remote
systems. (This is a different topic, which itself relies on answer back.)
I've never been convinced that the way that X did
it made sense. Sure, you'd
here people say things like "your remote Cray can draw stuff on your local
screen." But it wasn't just that; using X your Cray also had to draw and
manage your user interface: scroll bars, buttons, and so on unless you wanted
to create a separate protocol so that you could run your user interface
locally and have it communicate with the remote application. Of course, X was
enough of a pig that maybe using a Cray to drive a scroll bar made sense :-)
Maybe I'm a n00b and don't know better, but I'd think that would be a
use case for nested X running on a local (closer than the Cray) machine.
So all the Cray needed to do was to send program I/O to the (nested) X
server. Then the (nested) X server could handle scroll bars and other
local window manager eye candy.
I think the Cray would run something much like X does if you aren't
running a window manager. Simple, single application, no frills.
I think.
So before getting off into graphics APIs I think that
it would be interesting
to hash this out.
BTW, one of the best things about NeWS was the fact that with a reasonable set
of conventions the user interface personality could live in the server and be
applied to all applications. Contrast that with X where each application links
in a UI library, and if your screen looks anything like mine there isn't a lot
of consistency because different applications use different libraries.
One of the problems with NeWS was that this was so much fun to play with that
the people doing the work kept on coming up with new ideas faster than they
could implement the old ones so there was difficulty completing toolkit
projects.
LOL
Feeping Creatureism?
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die