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Rasterman Responds To Seth And Havoc
An anonymous reader writes "Rasterman, of Enlightenment fame, has responded to Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington's blog entries, which were in reference to this previous article. about Next gen X rendering. Raster says: 'Well it seems the XDevConf has produced some interesting blogs and discussion. I'm a bit sad I was not able to attend (no funding at all), as there seems to have begin a lot of discussion and moves in directions we in Enlightenment land have been going for years, and are likely far ahead in. I guess this means we haven't been able to share our experience in this. Maybe next year. Anyway the point is that this has started up some musings from Seth Nickell and Havoc Pennington related to this. This is great - finally people are beginning to take seriously what the Enlightenment crowd have been talking about for years.'" (Note: the previous post was about Nickell's post, not the other way around.)
That's part of the problem. While Raster's done a magnificent job -- and frankly, it's pretty mind-blowing -- he's completely not concerned about backwards compatibility regarding toolsets. Again, what he's done is amazing but it's basically a canvas, not a traditional toolkit.
The OSS GUI world is so deeply rooted in Qt/KDE and GTK+/Gnome that there's no chance at *all* that people will adopt his APIs for the next gen display system.
Red Hat's people are concerned with achieving this kind of stuff without too deeply breaking source compatibility. If they can pull that off, my hat's off to them.
That said, red hat's people can learn a *lot* by working with Raster. Clearly, his code is fast, and his technical design's good. But the model is likely inapplicable to traditional widget toolkits.
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Rasterman left Redhat because he felt noone there really followed his vision of an X desktop. Here we are years later and we've come full circle. Now, many (if not most) users in the community are looking for highly customizable desktop eyecandy and Gnome, KDE, and Xorg are all out there trying to deliver on what Rasterman was doing 3 years ago.