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The State of X.Org
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has up an article looking at the release of X Server 1.4.1. This maintenance release for X.Org, which the open-source operating systems depend upon for living in a graphically rich world, comes more than 200 days late and it doesn't even clear the BugZilla release blocker bug. A further indication of problems is that the next major release of X.Org was scheduled to be released in February... then May... and now it's missing with no sign of when a release will occur. There are still more than three dozen outstanding bugs. Also, the forthcoming release (X.Org 7.4) will ship with a slimmer set of features than what was initially planned."
I agree. I recently discovered the xfree86 project. It seems like a good alternative to x.org.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Oh, wait.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Mostly the time we spend posting on Slashdot.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Well, excuuuse me! Blame the community. I would blame the code instead. I happen to be one of those few people who actually wanted to contribute something. Specifically, there was this bug where the server would crash after a VT switch, so I thought I'd take a look. Have you seen the X.Org tree? It's not just huge. It's unreadable. I honestly didn't even know where to start. Documentation was minimal. If you wanted to trace one of your Xlib calls, you wouldn't be able to. There are modules, but they don't seem to have any clear purpose. There are libraries that are wrappers around something which is a wrapper around something else. Try and find the real code! I dare you! Even just building the damn thing is a major ordeal. With the current XOrg tree from git, I can't do it at all. Yes, that's right: I can't even compile it, and that ought to be the simplest thing you can do with a project. You want to know why I'm not helping the XOrg project? Because it's a pile of steaming crap, that's why, and I have better things to do with my time than trying to build a windowed skyscraper out of it.
Smelly hippies?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Okay, so here's an idea...
/. and other sites to get people involved but we'll freeze the code and not allow any new developers/submissions on the project. Frustrated, they'll go over to X.Org to try to work for the competition.
We should revive XFree86. To start, we should generate a list of features for the next release. We'll spread some rumors about what we're doing, let the world see how hard we're working on it.
This should get some attention from
Now for phase II. About this time next year we announce a release date, delay it a few times, then release it about two years from now. Make it a big deal. Major release. Get everybody talking about it.
For the release we'll drop all of the major new features on the list. We'll fix a bug or two, something major like a spelling error in a log report. Of course, we'll add a few new bugs. We could drop support for some hardware. For new features we could change a few things in the conf file. Instead of "Section" you now have to use "Block". We could totally change the format of the ModeLine to something totally crazy (crazier?)
If this follows the corporate model we have today it should drive major innovation and more frequent releases from X.Org, though our XFree86 project would unfortunately take away most of X.Org's market share.
Open source projects would probably earn the respect of more businesses and government agencies if it would just follow these common sense models from the corporate world.
The X server should be mostly scrapped and rewritten in Java. Java is a language that is suited for managing information like that, while still being high-performance (enough). The server could be rewritten in C++, but C++ is messy and is a complicated and archaic language at this point anyway.
Take a look at for instance weirdx which basically one person did. It handles most of the core functions of X and plenty fast (of course it is incomplete since it is one person's hobby). Or see Sun's Project Looking Glass, an opengl X server written in Java -- that was also written in one guy's spare time. With more development on these they could be real competitors to X.org while being more approachable, and I'll bet faster than the C code.