Community involvement, was Re: Weird issue with X11 via launchd
Community involvement, was Re: Weird issue with X11 via launchd
- Subject: Community involvement, was Re: Weird issue with X11 via launchd
- From: Ben Byer <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 02:58:58 -0700
On Nov 1, 2007, at 4:42 PM, Mike Beattie wrote:
Hell, there are probably people out there that would be better suited
for this job than me. I have several years of X experience as a user,
and fair bit of experience as an X developer on the client side,
but I
only looked at the server code for the first time about a year ago.
Most of that past year has gone towards getting the thing to build,
correctly, and fixing crashes -- you know, the kinds of things that
you can catch in GDB.
Don't put yourself down. From where I sit, you're doing a great job of
supporting the users who will invariably have issues with a codebase
change
like this. Keep it up, you'll be fine.
Thanks :) I guess that came off as more self-deprecating than I had
intended. Let me try again.
Put bluntly: Fullscreen mode won't happen if I'm the one that has to
write the code. Why?
X11 is a complicated beast. The people who wrote the fullscreen and
rootless code in the Tiger X11.app had years of experience in graphics-
related coding -- I had very little before I started working on
Xquartz a year ago. My team focuses more on things like perl, tcl,
top, apache, launchd, etc. However, we have more experience with
dealing with the open-source community, so my team agreed to take on
responsibility for most of X11.app so that we could try to integrate
back with X.org and get where we are today. (BTW, that did not
include quartz-wm and libXplugin.)
I spent at least a month trying to hack fullscreen support back into
the X.org codebase, and a couple of my teammates tried, too. We
failed. If I hadn't spent that time on fullscreen, I probably would
have been able to fix most of the issues I've fixed in these patches
over the past three days, but hindsight is 20/20 and it seemed like a
higher priority, since that was the most common complaint we received
during Leopard's development.
Given another six months, I could probably learn enough to make this
work. Maybe. On the other hand, the people who are really into "this
graphics stuff" would probably be able to get something working with a
weekend of work. Those people are out there -- I know some of them
are even reading this, right now, and they know who they are. This
message is partially to them.
To the rest of you who would like to help -- dive in! The only
difference between me and the other developers here, in terms of
ability to contribute to X11 on the Mac, is that I've spent slightly
more time banging my head against the wall, and I've gotten paid for
it -- but that doesn't automatically translate into our ability to fix
every bug.
I'd rather spend my time doing things that only I can do -- merging
patches to X.org git. Trying to push patches out in Software
Updates. Lobbying for better interfaces. Sorting through Radar bug
reports. Coordinating efforts to improve integration. Meeting with
the Spaces folks to figure out those bugs.
Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now; maybe I just need more sleep.
Ben Byer
CoreOS / BSD Technology Group, XDarwin maintainer
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