Re: [9fans] VGA Hell, what else?!

[Quinn Dunkan <quinn@envy.ugcs.caltech.edu>]

> It is unfortunate that the Plan 9 developers are so serious :-)  Graphic
> games are a significant aspect of the more popular operating systems, and
> Plan 9 is sorely lacking in that direction.  Not that that isn't in
> itself an advantage, keeping the more frivolous developers at bay, but it
> does deter from serious developers applying their skills to port
> otherwise solid, but graphic-demanding applications to Plan 9.
> 
> A graphic ABI (what's that "B"?  'Tused to be a "P", can someone explain
> the difference?) would be wonderful, but looking at the X11(3) man pages,
> I fall into the deepest despair.  A pity, really, I'd like Tcl/Tk to be
> available in Plan 9.

I don't have any particular desire for a buttons and menus style graphics
toolkit, but an opengl library would be really nice.  On the widget toolkit
front, I wonder if it would be practical to have a 'gfx server' that does for
graphical programs what acme does for text ones, or give acme the ability to
display bitmaps and positioned text, etc.  If there were to be a plan9 web
browser, it could be built on such a foundation.

Hey, maybe if we wish for these things enough they'll sort of materialize out
of thin air :)  Seriously, though, I don't think these things are lacking
because plan 9 developers all shun graphics, but because they take a lot of
work and there doesn't seem to be many swarms of eager developers around.  I
imagine that if someone did some solid work that added needed functionality,
it would get folded into the main distribution.

On a somewhat-related topic, would it be possible to teach aux/vga to load
XF86 driver modules?  If it could, that would basically solve the vga driver
problem.  Or maybe it's less work to just add each card to aux/vga directly,
as is done currently?  I haven't looked at the spec for the modules, but
hopefully they're reasonably X-independent.

Also, on the subject of cross-directory renames that came up a while back, is
the plan9 position to just try to avoid having to move a large tree to a
different directory, and if you must, sit back while it copies and deletes?
 From the sound of it, a cross-directory rename not implemented for good
reasons, but what's the alternative?  What do the bell labs people do when
they find themselves confronted with 't/huge-dir' that needs to be
'./huge-dir'?

Obviously, bind can work nicely, but is only really appropriate for situations
where the "move" is temporary and only needs to be seen by procs in the same
namespace group.  I don't even know if there's a way to remove a file from the
namespace.  I know you could MREPL an empty directory over a directory, but a
single file?