[TUHS] X and NeWS history (long)

[Jon Steinhart]

Grant Taylor writes:
> I personally really like the ability to SSH to a machine (*) using -XY 
> and run Oracle's installer such that it's display shows up on my notebook.

Well, I agree that this is one area in which X does OK.

Although, being a command line sort of guy, I'm happy to ssh into a machine
and run commands.  I try to avoid non-scriptable GUIs.

I don't administer headless machines, and stay very far away from Oracle.
I'm not sure what their installer does, but usually running X requires an
installed and running system.

So since a number of people have justified networked graphics we're back
to the question of what an API should look like.  At a very high level,
it needs to be modular because there is no one thing that gets done with
graphics, and there's no reason to carry a huge API around just because
you need a small part of it.  In particular, there is a distinction
between applications that spit out geometry and those that spit out mass
quantities of pixel/voxel data.

Also, because of the way that this discussion started, I'm not sure whether
or not resource management (windows, keyboard, etc.) falls under the
umbrella of graphics.

Jon