Connecting to a modern Xserver with an old client

[Carsten Haitzler]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2023 20:56:30 +1000 Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net>
said:

> 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.

I think the suggestion to just log this specific error (endianess) and only
this would be a rare event but worth logging on the server side as at least
you'd have something to go by. it'd otherwise be as quiet as it is now.


-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
Carsten Haitzler - raster at rasterman.com