Naive X-1Server0-for-Symbolics Question

[barmar@THINK.COM]

    Date: Mon, 31 Jul 89 12:28 EDT
    From: rjb1%vega%gte.com@relay.cs.net (Richard J Brandau)

    We're interested in using some of our Symbolics machines as part-time X
    servers -- that is, to act as terminals for an X client process running
    on a UNIX network host.

    Symbolics1 (really ILA?)0 

ILA has sold it to Symbolics

			    X-Windows1 [sic*] seems to be a very smart
0    1version of an X client, generating X from 2(any?)1 

0Just about any.  Applications that try to access screen bitmaps directly rather than via window
system messages and functions lose, but just about everything else should work (it had better --
this is how their Ivory embeddings work).

1						      Genera application.  It
    might also include a server, though this isn't really explicit in the
    blurb I got from my sales rep.

0Yes, it does include a server.

1    So, does anyone have experience with Symbolics X-Windows?  Will it do
    what I want, as well as the really neat stuff that I don't really need?
    Is there something simpler/cheaper that just implements the server?  

0The X server included with the XWS package is a port of the sample X server that MIT distributes
(it's written in C, and compiled with the Symbolics C compiler).  It's pretty buggy, because
Symbolics C runtime is much more picky than the environments the code was designed for (for
example, Symbolics C catches wrong numbers of arguments and references to uninitialized
structure components, and goes into the debugger).  It's not well tuned to the Symbolics
environment, either.  Some applications simply don't work at all (it's a port of the X11 Release
2 server, so it's missing some bug fixes MIT made in R3 and it also doesn't know about X11R3's
font naming scheme).  I've got a couple of patches that fix the uninitialized components that
I've encountered.  With those in place, it works well enough to server for xterm and GNU Emacs.

I don't know whether Symbolics will sell you the server without the client software.  The two
pieces are completely independent systems, so you certainly don't *need* one for the other.
However, they describe the server as being included merely to aid in debugging of client
applications, not intending it to be a full-featured X server.  However, like you we mostly need
the server, not the client software (because our software has to be portable to Unix, we haven't
been writing many applications that make use of Symbolics windows).

1									 Is
    there something else we should consider (like interoperability with CLIM
    and/or Common Windows and/or <Other-User-Interface-Standards-Salad>)?

0Those things operate at a much higher level than you're concerned with.  They make use of X as
the low-level window system protocol engine, so they'd still require an X Server.

								barmar