[comp.windows.x] XInstallColormap question

Francois.Bitz@SAM.CS.CMU.EDU (07/22/90)

I am having trouble figuring out the correct 
behavior of XInstallColormap in that I thought
that when a new colormap is installed  (i.e when
I move into an application window) ONLY the
color entries for pixels (in the harware colormap) that have
been allocated by the application sould be
modified. This is on an 8 bits PseudoColor display.

Instead it seems that ALL pixels entries (256 entries) 
are modified; which I think is pretty odd. 
I have a lot of windows with different colormaps
and each windows utilizes 224 cells for 
displaying images while the remaining cells are
globally defined.

Does this mean that I should allocate  and fill the  color
entries for the cells I am not using when I create a new
colormap?

Thanks for any help on this.

rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bob Scheifler) (07/22/90)

    I thought
    that when a new colormap is installed  (i.e when
    I move into an application window) ONLY the
    color entries for pixels (in the harware colormap) that have
    been allocated by the application sould be
    modified.

A good server would probably do this, but there's no such requirement.
(I don't know if there are many good servers, in this regard. :-)
The protocol is only meant to guarantee that the installed maps have
correct colors, not that any particular remnants of uninstalled maps
have correct colors.