I completely agreed, and suggested almost exactly that to the X people
a couple of years ago (Ralph Swick specifically, IIRC).
The response was, 'that's kinda what PEX is meant for'.
But now PEX is largely an ex-parrot for one reason or another,
OpenGL is lovely but quite heavyweight and doesn't slot into the
X architecture seamlessly (unless you have an SGI, and then only
to an extent), and a few extentions to the drawable featureset
would go down very nicely.
XCopyScaledArea(display, src, dest, gc, src_x, src_y, src_width,
src_height, dest_x, dest_y, dest_width, dest_height)
Display *display;
Drawable src, dest;
GC gc;
int src_x, src_y;
int dest_x, dest_y;
int src_width, src_height;
int dest_width, dest_height;
That sort of thing.
Better if it were an official X extension than an xf86 one, certainly.
And long overdue.
Cheers,
--Adam