Created attachment 498534 [details, diff] xinerama-use.desc.patch Remove the misleading "…is mandatory if you work in multiple monitors setup", which hasn't been true since a while. Modern X systems do not require Xinerama for mulithead any more. Therefore add a hint that it is a legacy extension. Pull request: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/5926
x11@gentoo.org, can you confirm that?
Apps still use the xinerama api to query monitor dimensions, and that functionality is enabled via the xinerama use flag in several apps. It's a way that apps even today query the dimensions of monitors running in a single X screen so they, for example, fullscreen to the size of the current monitor rather than the entire X screen that spans multiple monitors. Even if the xinerama extension isn't enabled in X, other components can implement the xinerama interface so that apps can behave correctly when 1 X screen has multiple monitors (e.g. nvidia's twinview in the proprietary drivers being the obvious and widely used example).
The bug has been closed via the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=a7c08bad450151a50c7cea838e5ca512bb245e28 commit a7c08bad450151a50c7cea838e5ca512bb245e28 Author: Florian Schmaus <flo@geekplace.eu> AuthorDate: 2017-10-12 09:03:11 +0000 Commit: Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2018-01-27 10:09:03 +0000 profiles/use.desc: Improve "xinerama" description Remove the misleading "…is mandatory if you work in multiple monitors setup", which hasn't been true since a while. Modern X systems do not require Xinerama for mulithead any more. Therefore add a hint that it is a legacy extension. Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/634182 Closes: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/5926 profiles/use.desc | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
Comment #2 is the correct one, so the description is still not good.
The bug has been closed via the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=6efcc3ed5f4d79140e529d7c7d1d561f5ec7f093 commit 6efcc3ed5f4d79140e529d7c7d1d561f5ec7f093 Author: Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn <chithanh@gentoo.org> AuthorDate: 2018-01-27 21:59:08 +0000 Commit: Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn <chithanh@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2018-01-27 21:59:08 +0000 profiles/use.desc: Modernize "xinerama" description The Xinerama extension is not widely used any more. This flag instead toggles support for the API which applications use to query the screen geometry on multi-monitor systems. Update the description to match the current behaviour. Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/634182 profiles/use.desc | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)