Re: Miguel's speech on lwn.net?

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

Just to add a little noise here, I have to point out a couple of
things about X...

First, everybody confuses the meaning of "X".  There's a protocol, and
there's an implementation of the protocol.  The current
implementations of the protocol are almost entirely based on the MIT/X
Consortium/Open Group/X.org implementation, so they tend to suck
equally.  There's nothing stopping somebody from implementing the
protocol better (and, in fact, I like to think that XFree86 is getting
noticably better than the stock X11 sources).

The *protocol* sucks for various reasons, but most of them are
relatively easily fixed.  (As an example, font handling under X11
sucks, but there's nothing stopping somebody from implementing a
SANE-FONT extension and submitting it to the appropriate people to get
it included in X11R6.5 or something.  Sure, it'll take a while to
catch on, but it *can* be done.)  The X11 protocol is pretty
amazing...  You can pull out the oldest X terminal you can find, and
if it talks X11, you can use it with your Linux box running X11R6.4. 
(Some things might not work properly, but most applications will
degrade gracefully.)  Using the latest server with ancient clients
will almost always work perfectly.

Anyway, it just always bugs me when people start bitching about X.
Most seem completely ready to throw out 20 years of *good* design just
to clean out a little cruft.  (OK, maybe it's more than a little...)
I wish more people would think about just fixing the servers and
*trying* to just add on to the protocol.  If it just isn't possible,
then maybe it's time for X12.

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Linux Users of Central Illinois
(618)398-7320             | Meetings the 4th Tuesday of every month
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.luci.org/ for more info
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