Problems with X.org and incompatibilities with in-house software

[Alan Coopersmith]

Corbin Simpson wrote:
> Admittedly, I'm kind of young, but I had to go Google all the other
> extensions to even get a hint of what they do. That's probably not a
> good sign. :3

You will undoubtedly not be the only X developer who is younger than some
of this code.   Even with everything that's been dumped, X.Org still has
a lot of 20-25 year old code left in it, and a lot of that is unlikely to
ever go away.

You can complain about the server extensions going away, but any portable,
well written client always had to check if they were present and do something
sane if they weren't - only in recent history has the world coalesced to just
a few X server implementations, now that most of the proprietary variants of
the days of the Unix wars have died out.    (Really, it's mainly just the
X.Org implementation (as Xorg, Xwin, Xquartz or kdrive) on almost all Unix-like
systems with a desktop these days, and a few others on other systems, like the
commercial options for native X servers on Microsoft Windows.)

On the client side we've pretty much preserved API & ABI compatibility, even
when that required major gyrations for the XCB effort - while we encouarage
migration to the new XCB libraries, it will be a couple decades before libX11
fades away.

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