Bill Janssen wrote:
>
> I know, it's tough. And I (and I'm sure everyone else) really
> appreciate the spirit and energy with which you, particularly, Ben,
> are going to town trying to remedy the situation. It's great, I've
> never seen a company like Apple respond in this fashion, and I hope
> that we can see more of it from more companies in the future. Kudos!
>
> And this problem isn't your fault, anyway. This was a decision made
> by your boss, or his boss, or a matrix of people evaluating many
> factors which your customers aren't privy to. What's even more
> frustrating is that it's not really a technical problem, not something
> that *you* can fix with a patch or a new hardware gadget.
The decision to move Apple's X11 to X.org was, and is, a sound one.
Because of the, dare I say, ancient, code and libraries in the older X11
it was becoming more and more difficult to build and run modern X11
applications on Mac OS X. This is why, for example, the Gimp.app people
bundle some libraries in their application bundle, the shipping ones are
too old to run newer gimp.
> Perhaps not relevant to the smaller XDMCP technical issue, but I
> included it because I suspect it's a symptom of your group's apparent
> misunderstanding of why X11 is part of OS X.
X11 was not originally a part of OS X. People, both inside and outside
of Apple ported it, in their free time, so that it would run on OS X.
The fact that it was eventually included in the OS distribution is nice,
but we survived for a good number of years without it being included...
> I wasn't suggesting not releasing it -- let me say again, this sure
> looks to me like the right path to go down. I was suggesting,
> instead, releasing it when it was ready, perhaps with some DP previews
> before that.
It would never have been ready if it was not released though. Ben would
be fixing bugs in the older X11, and working on the other portions of
his job. Jeremey, Nathan, Nathaniel and others would not be putting in
so much effort into fixing the problems. We'd be stuck with the tiger
X11 forever.
While it is unfortunate that all the bugs were not entirely eliminated
prior to 10.5 shipping (like that ever happens!), I have to applaud the
decision to ship it.
Peter
--
Peter O'Gorman
http://pogma.com
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