Re: About the future of X (Windows)

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 08:25:04PM -0600, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> The 'who's in charge of the future of X11' is a valid question,
> but there's nothing that I can add to that.  Gnome has a vested 
> interest in making sure that X11 development is 'on the right track'.
> Insofar as some of the XFree86 Core Team do not (or cannot, or don't 
> want to, by their own admission) picture themselves as the leaders
> and standard bearers of the future of X11, that's a problem, and 
> Gnome must take note.  
[...]
> But the tangled issue of 'what is the future of X11, and who controls
> it' really really is important, and its one to watch.

  All this is my opinion, not an official position :-)

  I think that's possibly the core of the issue from a GNOME/KDE perspective.
We need to work on X11 as a platform. That platform need to evolve so that
we stay in the Desktop race on Linux/Unix. So far there is no entities leading
the effort in a concerted, "vendor"-neutral fashion. As a result we depended
only on Xfree86 to try to get this, and this should not work that way, it's
too fragile, it's not sane. 
  In essence we need new extensions to be developped, we need this to be
a concerted deployment so that we can use those on the whole line of X11
implementation. In the face of such developments having multiple
groups/vendor lining up to develop and test them is actually a good thing,
having Keith and others make different implementations and report is
the best way to ensure this will work well as a platform upgrade.
  Note that this is orthogonal to the issue of integration of driver
fixes and updates, this is really about making the extensions to the X11
platform not about the internal plumbing, hardware detail, or even social
aspects that seems to also have motivated the split. KDE/GNOME should not
take position on this, distributors of GNOME/KDE are the one concerned
with those aspects. This doesn't preclude people from the projects from
making up their own opinion about who/what's right or wrong in the current
situation, but I don't think the projects themselves should get involved
here :-) . The project(s) best interest is that all parties work together
toward a coherent platform upgrade.

Daniel

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