Re: About the future of X (Windows)

[David Sugar <dyfet ostel com>]

Linas Vepstas wrote:

> Gnome needs to be on the side of innovation and responsiveness, 
I would disagree to a point; X must be maintained integral as a 
standard.  If GNOME endorses, or worse yet, depends on a fork for the 
convenience of rapid development it may do users more harm than good if 
that fork either diverges in api specs or proves not to be popular or 
effective due to stability; as the latter is always a tradeoff with 
rapid progress.

I have heard lots of "political" issues with regard to this forking of 
XFree86, and disregarding those as irrelevent since I have no basis to 
judge the accuracy of those statements or claims about any specific 
individuals involved, I would still think it is important that GNOME 
correcty use and depend upon the base version until or unless that (or 
any other) fork becomes widely used and proves equally reliable.

In fact it is rare to have true or permenant forks in free software 
unless the fork of the underlying package is fundimentally and 
deliberately changed to be incompatible, simply because the changes from 
any "progressive" fork can often be folded back into the other 
distribution.  I do not see why they could not choose to maintain a base 
(stable) branch and a "progressive" branch concurrently rather than 
having to declare a fork and split up.

>