Subject: Re: [SUMMARY] Re: [un]compface to use xbm format?

From: richb@stard (Rich Burridge)
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1991 20:21:01 +1000

} Dissenting vote: I think a format that is portable and easily
} treatable with tools such as the PBM P4 format would also be
} good, and is denser besides (being binary).
} 
} However, it seems the weight of popular opinion is against me.

This is a valid point. We shouldn't really limit ourselves to just one
format, and as color becomes more popular, and eventually the norm, this
has to be taken into consideration.

John Mackin has persuaded me to hold off on these mods to [un]compface
until the xface corruption problems have been found and fixed. This is
very good advice, so I'll concentrate on other bugs for now, and leave
the corruption problems to him and James Ashton. There's certainly enough
other problems to choose from.

I've also postponed the generation of the faces/3 prototype until I have
a good 2-3 solid days I can put towards it in one go. At the moment, as
OpenWindows V3 gets closer and closer to FCS (first customer shipment),
my time is almost completely occupied with bug fixing. This should slacken
off in a month or so.

I'm also intending to do an SVR4 port. I did this last week for another of
my freely available programs, so this should be a "piece of cake". Famous
last words. It mainly involves uncommenting the appropriate set of definitions
in the Makefile. There will be one new one (HAS_POLL), to signify that the
poll(2) system call should be used instead of the select(2) call. I'm going
to add that example configuration section to the README file (see the entry
in the TODO file), and the SVR4 definitions can be commented there.

---

From: Boyd Roberts <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 91 17:21:15 +0200

just a second here before we start hacking code.  why not just write
a program to take a blit icon and spit out an xbm or some other object
that pbm+ can deal with.  we should _not_ be building in special support
for all sorts of weird shit into the core of faces.

add what you like around the edges.  remember:  the pipeline is you friend.

or, have we all forgotten?