Linked by Rahul on Tue 4th Nov 2008 06:17 UTC
Kristian Hogsberg, Red Hat Xorg developer and the key person behind successful projects such as AIGLX, has now started working on a new project called Wayland, a tiny display server and compositing manager.
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Member since:2006-01-17
I don't know where people get this idea of "X is broken" or "X is archaic". I don't have any problems with Xorg, and judging by the amount of progress that was made on it recently, I'm surprised anybody still holds this view.
Xorg is working fine these days. However I don't think it is feasible to extend the protocol for something like object API (like this one), for that it has to be redesigned (otherwise you end up with very ugly workarounds). That is a syntactical argument for an overhaul.
Also there are some issues with exhausting extension ID numbers, so it's not extendable forever (unless you go into hacks, again). Sometimes it's just simpler to make incompatible changes (and keep around new and old protocol, separated).
If community is going to break the API, it's the opportunity to implement some other postponed or worked-around features (reconnects and server migration, anyone?). Not that Wayland approach is going to be a new API, but whenever they decide to bump protocol number, they better fix what they have to (and at least for aesthetical reasons, get rid of that 80's API style).
Member since:2006-01-02
There's no point in breaking the API. Old stuff will be unused and barely supported, being of almost no cost to the project, and new stuff can be added, heavily-used stuff can be optimized. Thanks to widespread use of toolkits, most apps can seamlessly switch over to using new features without even having to recompile.
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Member since:
2008-05-26
The Xorg developers regularly get rid of old stuff that's no longer used, and they also redesign Xorg on-the-fly as they are developing other things.
I don't know where people get this idea of "X is broken" or "X is archaic". I don't have any problems with Xorg, and judging by the amount of progress that was made on it recently, I'm surprised anybody still holds this view.
Having said that, if somebody wants to work on a small side-project of a different sort of graphical server, then they should go right ahead and do it.