Connecting to a modern Xserver with an old client

[Peter Hutterer]

On Mon, Jul 24, 2023 at 10:56:13AM +0100, Dave Howorth wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Jul 2023 14:14:37 -0700
> Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 7/23/23 13:48, Carsten Haitzler wrote:
> > >> So as per the man page I added +byteswappedclients to the Xorg
> > >> command line and it works!  
> > > 
> > > wow... i've never encountered that before. in all these decades...
> > > well well. :)  
> > 
> > It was only added a few months ago:
> > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/1029
> > 
> > Xwayland 23.1 was the first stable release to ship it - on the Xorg
> > side I don't think it's in any stable release yet, just the git repo.
> 
> It sounds like there needs to be a clearer error message produced,
> given the amount of hassle it's taken to identify this problem. I'm not
> sure whether the server or the client ought to report it explicitly,
> but I guess it would be a smaller change to ensure that a server with
> the new feature logged any failures that it caught/caused?

I'm not really disagreeing but we don't have a lot of options here,
doubly so for old clients that won't be modified. We do use the proper
client error reporting so ideally you'll see that on the terminal - alas
if you're not starting the client from the terminal you won't see that.

And logging every access from a client is not great either - and logging
it once will likely just make it disappear in the rest of the server log.

Cheers,
  Peter