[PATCH 00/15] xserver: cleanup and standardize startup options

[Alan Coopersmith]

Kristian Høgsberg wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Alan Coopersmith
> <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
>> Tiago Vignatti wrote:
>>> Hi fellows,
>>>
>>> Our culture is turning "-option" the default syntax for arguments to be passed
>>> to the server. This patch set tries to standardize the rest of arguments that
>>> are not on such shape yet, removing some superfluous ones and also doing some
>>> other janitor work around.
>>>
>>> I tried to be very conservative in this patchset, avoiding to do major
>>> changes on behaviour.
>> "Very conservative" is not changing any existing working configs into
>> things that generate errors and fail to start the X server because
>> their options are now invalid.   This series doesn't seem to qualify
>> as "very conservative."
> 
> I agree, this is not something we can change.

I'm not sure I'd say none of them can change, some of the proposed patches are
for options I'd expect few people use - unfortunately we have no way of knowing
the real world usage of these and how widespread or unused they are.

Certainly for the ones we know people use, a sudden "flag day" approach where
one day the old option works and the next day the new one does, with no
transition in the middle where both work, is not a very friendly way to do it.

A "developer friendly" approach would leave enough of a transition that you're
not likely to get broken every time you git bisect or switch from master to
the 1.9 branch to check your backports.

A "distro friendly" approach widens that so that distros don't have to have
complex constraints on their packaging, enforcing that if you install Xorg <=
1.9.x you get an old version of their display manager config package and if you
install Xorg >= 1.10 you get the new version and the two must be kept strictly
in sync.

A "user friendly" approach doesn't just take your existing config and return
"Fatal error: invalid option", but "Warning: +extension is deprecated, change
your config to -extenable" in one version, and "Error: +extension has been
replaced by -extenable" in a later release.

I am as disgusted by the X server command line syntax as everyone else, but I
also actually answer questions from users on #xorg & xorg at lists.fd.o as well
as our distro-specific lists, plus have to deal with the bug reports and
coordination with our gnome team to fix the gdm config in our distro - changes
like this have a large impact and can be painful if done harshly and without
consideration for the actual users.   #xorg and the mailing lists are still
filled regularly with users very confused about how to configure their mouse
and keyboard now - the xorg.conf.d system is clearly better, and several distros
have written nice web pages we can point to with explanations, but we are still
paying the price of our HAL mistake and the churn and confusion caused.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System