On Dec 12, 2007, at 11:19 PM, John Koren wrote: Ben,
I would urge Apple to release the new version of X11 for Leopard as soon as possible. The version that came with the initial release of Leopard was absolutely shameful. Having non-functioning X11 may turn developers, such as MathWorks, away from Mac OS X platform as they have done already before. Working X11 is absolutely crucial for the scientific community, which ports many Solaris and Linux applications.
John,
While I realize that X11.app 2.0 (the one that shipped with Leopard) has some frustrating bugs, I don't think I'd go as far as calling it "shameful" -- but that's been discussed at great length already on this list, and I don't think there's anything more to say about that. We did our best, and I stand by our decision.
Going forward, the community here has done a great job of testing (and in many case, creating) fixes for the issues. Again, we hope to ship an updated version of X11.app at some point in the future. I have no control over A. how many fixes we can put into that release (as many as I can), nor B. how much time I can put into preparing those fixes (already as much as I can), nor C. how soon that release will be made (I'd like for it to be soon, but it is not within my control, or that of my boss, nor of my boss's boss, etc.)
Your concerns are not falling on deaf ears -- but there's nothing more we can do. The machine is moving as fast as it can, and calling it names does not make it move faster.
I don't know what prompted your reference to MathWorks, but my conversations with them have been pleasant and productive. We do as much as we can to ease the transition to a major new OS release by providing many developers with advance copies of the OS through the Developer Seeding program -- this gives them opportunity to submit bug reports through bugreport.apple.com (yes, the same resource I ask all of you to use). It would not be appropriate for me to comment more on specific developers, although I think it fair to say that they have experienced issues similar to other complicated, popular apps -- such as Gimp.app.
During the Leopard Seed cycle, we received several reports (from both Apple employees and external developers) that Gimp.app would not launch -- this was a problem that only could be fixed inside of Gimp.app, because it was a conflict caused by the way they included X11 dylibs inside their .app bundle. (This is an example of a bug that can only be fixed by the developer, and I should point out that they still have not released an official fixed version on http://gimp-app.sourceforge.net/ -- but I imagine that they, too, are busy people who are working as hard as they can.)
-- CoreOS / BSD Technology Group, XDarwin maintainer |