DIB Engine

[Massimo Del Fedele]

I recently had a chat with Dan Kegel about the way to contribute and 
start hacking on a DIB engine. I grabbed Huw Davies and Jesse Allen's 
repositories and started looking at them.
As it'll be an hard (and long) work, I'd like to know some opinions on 
how to proceed and propose an idea on how to have it introduced in 
mainstream without breaking stuff.
The idea is, for now, JUST an idea and I still don't know if it'll be 
possible, but I guess yes.
So, I was thinking on :

1) Try to join best stuffs of both repos of Huw and Jesse.

2) Add the environment variable DIBENGINE which could have 3 different 
values (or be missing) :

     missing DIBENGINE env var or
     DIBENGINE=NONE    New dib engine will not be used, back to X11DRV

     DIBENGINE=FORWARD Unimplemented stuffs forwarded to X11, the rest
                       using new dib engine code

     DIBENGINE=FULL    use just dib engine code and shows FIXMEs for
                       unimplemented stuffs

The first would allow to insert dib engine in main stream without 
breaking anything, the last would allow to see what's more important to 
implement. The middle one (FORWARD) would allow to check if something 
breaks during the transition, and use the developed parts.

3) Stop and wait till it's put on mainstream, so more people could 
contribute.

The doubt is if it'll be possible the mixed approach, forwarding 
unimplemented stuffs to X11, but I think so.

Is it an acceptable way to proceed ?

Ciao

Max