lack of standardization on X11 (was Re: X Gesture Extension protocol - draft proposal v1)

[Adam Jackson]

On Wed, 2010-08-18 at 14:27 +0300, Vignatti Tiago (Nokia-MS/Helsinki)
wrote:

> When someone constructs a protocol that you can manipulate it for adding and
> removing pieces as much as you want, without use the core protocol, then in my
> opinion is shameless abuse.

X11R1 shipped with extensions, you know.  Two of them, in fact.  The
extension mechanism is the _only_ reason X survived past X11R5.  Try
running a modern desktop without XC-MISC sometime.

> The whole point to create a consistent protocol is the life time that it will
> last. Right now I don't see any consistency between X applications that I'm
> building today with the ones we had in the last decade. I cannot run both in
> the same X server. I even doubt I can use today's X app in the upcoming 2 or
> 3 years server.

A few Fedora releases ago, when we were wrangling about Firefox
trademark issues, I decided - in the name of lols - to go dig out a copy
of redbaron (a non-free browser Red Hat shipped for approximately one
release) and see how well it still worked.  Took a bit of work to build
a chroot for it with libc5 and the relevant X libs, but having done that
it worked fine on a Fedora X server.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/redhat/4.2/i386/RedHat/RPMS/redbaron-3.1-1.i386.rpm

So, uh.  I'm very sorry if your X server can't run a 14-year-old Xt app,
but mine doesn't seem to have any problem with it.

- ajax
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/attachments/20100818/84632615/attachment.pgp>