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Re: X11 wish list

I've posted a couple times on this list before, but let me take the opportunity to formally introduce myself.

My name is Ben Byer; I work for Apple in the CoreOS group, on the BSD Technology team -- we try to make OS X friendly for UNIX users. Although many engineers at Apple contribute to the effort that results in the X11.app you receive on your OS X DVD, I believe I'm the one here who puts the most focussed energy into X11.app.

As of a few months ago, I'm also the maintainer for the Darwin part of the X.org codebase. (This is partially a personal commitment, but one I make with the belief that it will ultimately make the rest of my "real" work more effective and efficient.)

I have a considerable background with Linux (and by extension, X11 as a user), even more so than I do as an Apple engineer -- I started here after the release of OS X 10.4. This puts me in a good position to work on X11.app, the bridge between two fairly different GUI worlds. It also means that I'm still learning about how X servers work in general, and how best to integrate one with the "Mac Experience".

Ernie's comment earlier was spot-on -- filing bug reports with Apple is the best way to make sure your bug receives attention. I know that it can be discouraging to file a bug report and not see your issue promptly responded to, but I can absolutely promise you that every single bug report you send in is looked at by an actual human being, often at several levels. We use them to

A) gauge how common a problem is -- we try to fix those first, when possible
B) collect vital information needed to reproduce the problem and to test our fixes
C) communicate with you, the submitter of the bug, when we believe you might have information to help us track down the bug.

Getting a response that your bug is a duplicate of another one may not seem helpful, but it should indicate to you that we're aware of the problem. On our side, we try to group as many similar bugs together as possible, in order to try to find and fix the deeper issues that cause a variety of symptoms. This way, we have fewer fixes to make, and hopefully those fixes will address bugs that we have not yet seen.

This email is getting a bit long, so let me try to address the specific issues you raised, and I'll save the rest for other emails:

On Aug 9, 2007, at 8:00 AM, email@hidden wrote:
From: Vincent Lefevre <email@hidden>
On 2007-08-09 00:17:53 -0500, Vernon Williams wrote:
However, if I select some text in xterm, copy it with Cmd-C, and
then deselect the text, I cannot paste anything into Terminal or
TextEdit. If I try, nothing is pasted, and I get a beep in Terminal.

But, if I select some text in xterm, copy it with Cmd-C, leave it
selected, and paste once into Terminal or TextEdit, then I can
deselect the text in xterm and still be able to paste it into
Terminal or TextEdit as many times as I want.


Which version of X11 do you have?

I've never had any such problem with X11 1.1.3.

It's no secret that X11 is being worked on for Leopard's release. Is there some way that after all of this prolonged discussion we can come up with a copy/paste proposal for Apple - either a bug report or an enhancement request?

We always welcome ideas for enhancements, although I'll say that the current copy/paste behavior is, in fact, buggy -- which is to say, it is not perfect, but the things that are supposed to work do not always work. More in a future message.

In fact, I propose starting up a new thread dedicated to identifying as many X11 bugs and issues as we can. Often even little things get the opportunity to get addressed only because the person coding up some related fix happens to be working in the vicinity. So don't be bashful - start mentioning all those petty but annoying issues like poor mouse arrow colors, odd xterm display defaults etc.

I'm not sure which xterm issue you have in mind, but the incorrectly colored mouse cursor issue was (personally) frustrating. It's a good example of a bug that I *know* exists, due to the multitude of bug reports we have received. However, I tried several times on several machines with several different configurations, and I wasn't able to reproduce it. If I can't make it happen, I can't fix it -- partially because I don't know where to look for the problem (although in this case, good patches were available for other sources), and partially because I can't test any fix I write unless I can reproduce the problem it was trying to fix.

Let's make X11 as good as it can be. Time is running out, October is fast approaching, and we have nothing to lose by asking...

I'm all all for you asking, and I appreciate all of the suggestions you can make, and I promise to take them seriously and to fix them if I am able, given the resources available to me and the rest of the people at Apple who work on X11.app. In return, I ask you (the collective you) to have some patience -- I will not always be able to respond to emails, but I will try to chime in when I have something helpful to add.

With regards to October -- the nice part about releasing X11.app with OS X is that it means it is available to everyone who uses the software. Unfortunately, it creates a lot more work, as we do quite a bit of internal testing before releasing it to the world. This means that the X11.app that comes with OS X will often not be the most current version, and there is a significant lag between when you report a bug, when we reproduce it, when we fix it, when the fix is tested and integrated into the rest of the operating system, and when you will see the result of your bug report.

Speaking as Ben, the X.org developer (as opposed to Ben, the Apple OS engineer) -- I hope that most of the development for X11.app will happen as part of the X.org development process. That will make it easier for you (the user or developer) to participate in the process; it means that X11.app will automatically receive updates and fixes as part of the X.org project, and it means you will be able to download newer (albeit unsupported by Apple) version in between OS releases. When appropriate, we will then roll those fixes back into OS X.

Ben Byer / CoreOS
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