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

[Peter Hutterer]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 08:25:43PM +0300, Vignatti Tiago (Nokia-MS/Helsinki) wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 07:05:25PM +0200, ext Adam Jackson wrote:
> > On Wed, 2010-08-18 at 14:27 +0300, Vignatti Tiago (Nokia-MS/Helsinki)
> > 
> > > 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.
> 
> that's cool! Honestly.
> 
> But I'm not talking about applications built on the top of almost-core X
> protocol, like redbaron. No one does this today. Get real and useful
> applications like recent compositor managers or a browser and come tell me
> about interoperability with old servers :)

At one point those apps were "real and useful applications". And in 10 years
time recent compositor managers will look as ancient as redbaron.

Cheers,
  Peter