[Xcb] Porting the rest of the X.Org apps to xcb

[Josh Triplett]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 05:13:34PM +0200, Mark Kettenis wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:39:16 -0700
> > From: Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com>
> > 
> > I suppose I left out my thinking about why it's useful to port the
> > X.Org apps to xcb.  Clearly the mainstream distros are going to have
> > to ship libX11 until approximately the end of time_t - there's just
> > too many thousands of existing applications out there from the last
> > 25 years.  I could see embedded or minimized systems being able to
> > get by without libX11 in the not-too-distant future, once we get all
> > the software they need to use ported (and I'd think they're more
> > likely to use modern/maintained software from GNOME, KDE, etc.  than
> > our ancient Xaw sample apps for their core desktop software) - from
> > the above list the top priority for that would probably be xinit.
> 
> Heh, that's reassuring.
> 
> > But every app we port ourselves gives us more insight into what is
> > needed to port apps, and figure out how to make it easier for
> > authors/maintainers of the much more complicated apps out there in
> > the rest of the world.  From the xwininfo port, at least I learned
> > that a set of functions to convert properties between the various
> > encoding types (STRING/iso8859-1, COMPOUND_TEXT/iso2022,
> > UTF8_STRING) would be very useful to save replicating that in every
> > program.  I imagine porting xrdb would give some similar insight
> > into what's needed for all the Xlib helper functions around resource
> > management.
> 
> On the other hand, it is also beneficial to leave some of the core
> applications use libX11 to make sure it doesn't suffer too much
> bitrot.

On the contrary, the more we port away from libX11, the more we don't
bother making new changes in it or making new libraries support it, and
the closer we get to a model in which only people who have ancient
programs that still use libX11 bother maintaining it. :)

- Josh Triplett