Re: Security concerns (Was Re: XQuartz quextion)
Re: Security concerns (Was Re: XQuartz quextion)
- Subject: Re: Security concerns (Was Re: XQuartz quextion)
- From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:33:39 -0800
On Nov 25, 2007, at 12:05 PM, dp wrote:
I think a little patience is what you're getting.
OK, perhaps I should have asked for a lot of patience instead of just
a little patience then. :-)
For my part I'm understand the process and understand the internal
workings of Apple and the limitations imposed on the X11 project. I
just didn't expect X11 to be so broken and badly documented in
Leopard as to be nearly unusable, and that a remedy (which is still
in work) would be so hard to find.
Again, as I pointed out in prior postings, this is a time of
transition away from XFree86 to X.org and hardly "business as usual"
in the X community, where we're working with a gracefully(?) aging
codebase and have plenty of time to tweak it.
The X.org codebase was badly broken for MacOSX. We did the best we
could to fix it up with limited resources, but ultimately Leopard also
had to ship and, frankly, technologies like Quartz and Cocoa are
always going to take precedence because they're the default UI. The
generic consumer, at whom Macs are aimed, will never see X11 and we
put the bulk of our energies into what the bulk of our consumers will
see. That is simply the nature of commercial software development and
I'm sure we've all seen the converse, where engineers are allowed to
put 90% of their efforts into technologies which generate only 10% of
the return yet are personally interesting to them. Most of those
companies are no longer around.
I also don't expect the trade-offs we made to be popular with this
particular list since nobody likes being on the losing end of that
equation, but I do hope that folks are at least capable of being
objective enough to understand why such decisions are made and to also
appreciate that extra effort is now being made to mitigate the
unavoidable consequences of those decisions.
I have also made every effort to point out that X.org's bits are Open
Source and that anyone is capable of helping to change the situation,
and some people have heard that call and responded (thanks again, you
know who you are!). This is, again, an unusual transitional situation
and once it's behind us, we'll be able to focus on much more
incremental micro-improvements and have a much better ability to match
Apple's resources to the tasks required.
Having found it, I'm accustomed to seeing sourceforge-like
organization with a project like this and lots of versioning
documentation. Hence my own question about locations of code and
changelog information.
This is another one of those lose/lose situations. If we had created
our own X11 portal and directed people to it, we could have controlled
the "quality of service" and overall presentation but would have then
faced criticism for needlessly duplicating another open source
project's infrastructure and confusing people who expected X.org bits
to be documented and available from X.org. By going "the proper
route" and joining them rather than forking off our own site, we now
face criticism from you for factors outside of our control.
I'm all for discussing this stuff openly since that's my pedigree, but
sometimes you just can't win.
- Jordan
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