Re: Palette hogging

[David Kastrup <dak neuroinformatik ruhr-uni-bochum de>]

   From: raster@redhat.com
   Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 14:58:13 -0500 (EST)

   You are perfectly correct.. but the fact is people are getting fatsre
   and faster machines wiht more ram and better gfx cards... PII-300 cpus'
   wil be at $200US by july... that makes them ultra-cheap for
   consumers... Yes gnoem will run on what I shall now call "legacy 8bpp"
   systems., but the display quality and results may nto be optimal.. I am
   just sayign we have alerady made some efforts in makign colormap usage
   "tame" inder 8bpp - Imlib has had this for over a year. I can't see
   that there is much mroe we can really do - in practical terms. Yes we
   coudl come up with ultra-complex powerful colormap allocation schemes
   with macthed entires liek you say and have these colromaps change
   between apps etc. etc. - but this means a fair bit of work for little
   gain - I woudl rather spend my time on features and applictaions
   themselves than trying to support hardware that ina few years will be
   rare and unused... It will work.. but not necessarily in the most
   beautiful fashion... it's alerady a lot better than most other colro
   management systems for X...

Well, I tend to forget that people working on one thing won't be able
to work on another at the same time.  So I guess reasonable support of
legacy systems (8bpp are not entirely legacy by now but there is an
ongoing trend that will be at a more advanced stage at the time Gnome
has become a standard desktop at least under all Unix type operating
systems) instead of perfect support of such systems should prove
satisfactory.  And the basic functionality achieved by Imlib sounds
like being able to restrict bad effects of otherwise nice "fanciness"
on 8bpp displays.  Still, one should perhaps not forget that the most
sophisticated and expensive X visual, DirectColor, allows for using
the palette for doing things like on-the-fly gamma correction and
multiphase displays using palette switching on 24bpp or similar.  So
not necessarily every bit of palette support is merely a legacy
investment.

But I guess at the moment more than basic and reasonable support of
both such overfancy systems as well as the very bland ones deserves
indeed no priority.

David Kastrup                                     Phone: +49-234-700-5570
Email: dak@neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de       Fax: +49-234-709-4209
Institut für Neuroinformatik, Universitätsstr. 150, 44780 Bochum, Germany