Dumb question about headless & Nebraska

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Tue Apr 3 17:19:09 UTC 2001


Henrik Gedenryd <Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se> is widely believed to have written:

> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> 
> > OTOH the efforts spent on this would better be spent on implementing a VNC
> > display server in Squeak.  One option is hacking ioShowDisplay. But maybe
> > intercepting BitBlt is a little bit more efficient because you can easily
> > distinguish fills from blts ...
> 
> Since BitBlt resides in a plugin one could make such a hack available as a
> plugin as Stephen suggested, possibly even with platform-independent source
> code.
I've been doing a little thinking about this sort of problem recently,
hoping to make a convenient way to produce 'subclasses' of plugins. This
would allow a 'subclass' of FilePlugin that uses the security options,
for example.
The problem is pretty simple; the plugin finding/loading code expects
the plugin name (used as the basename for the file it searches for) to
be matched with the moduleName string within the plugin.

If you were to make a SecureFilePlugin subclass of FilePlugin, it would
normally expect to have a moduleName of (duh) 'SecureFilePlugin' and
thus you would want to compile it as securefileplugin.so (or whatever).
Problem is then that you have to call it with <primitive: 'buggerMyDisc'
module:'SecureFilePlugin'> instead of <.... module: 'FilePlugin'>. Of
course, you can override the moduleName when translating the plugin, but
that leaves you with two plugins with the same name but subtly different
functionality. I think there have been some problems on Windoze with
that particular idea...
Perhaps making the plugin have a moduleName of FilePlugin and adding
(Secure) to the version info string, as well as using a filename of
SecureFilePlugin and then aliasing it to FilePlugin in the appropriate
search location?

Anyway, once some way exists to do this sort of thing, a VNCBitBltPlugin
would probably be quite simple.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: RPM: Read Programmer's Mind





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