Re: [9front] rio: resize flash patch

["Ethan Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020, at 12:21 AM, Amavect wrote:
> 
> I have thought about what the Right Thing should be. Neither mouse nor 
> wctl should be related to the act of drawing to the screen. That's 
> /dev/draw's responsibility. But rio's design is to not exactly stand 
> between the program and /dev/draw, so rio can't know anything.

Since Rio is responsible for governing the size and position of the windows implemented by the draw device, I have no problem at all with Rio supplying the redraw messages. Since Rio multiplexes the mouse and implements wctl, I think these seem reasonable channels for the messages.

As for which file the resize and reposition messages should be sent over; wctl or mouse, it currently comes over both of them. I'm happy with that. The wctl data is good for scripts which might want to re-run mc. The data over the mouse channel saves mouse-reading programs from having yet another file open. You may recall each open file requires a process under Plan 9.

General thought: designs which "feel right" can be unecessarily inefficient, complex and/or difficult to use. I liked Plan 9 for its pragmatic approach to problems: it doesn't take "this feels right" seriously; it does what works.