Re: Constructive conversations, was Re: AW: SV: focus failure with x11 and Mac OS X 10.5
Re: Constructive conversations, was Re: AW: SV: focus failure with x11 and Mac OS X 10.5
- Subject: Re: Constructive conversations, was Re: AW: SV: focus failure with x11 and Mac OS X 10.5
- From: Bill Janssen <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:30:48 PST
- Comments: In-reply-to Ben Byer <email@hidden> message dated "Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:48:38 -0800."
> > Look, the whole reason for X11 on Macs is to be compatible with
> > applications and business processes which have not yet drunk the
> > kool-aid and ported themselves to Quartz and the Apple Way. The
> > compatibility is the key here, not the improvements.
>
> Messages like this are the reason that many of my colleagues place a
> low priority on participating in these discussions. And when I say
> "messages like this", I specifically mean "general rants about
> dissatisfaction with changes in Leopard that are responses to
> specific, targeted help I am trying to give a user to overcome a
> specific problem they are seeing in the software that I spent the last
> year working on.
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 question I invite you to think about is, what's the point of
including X11 on OS X? The BSD group isn't in competition with the
Quartz group (if that is in fact the name of Apple's window system),
not trying to produce a better window system. X11 isn't something
that any of Apple's software relies on, is it? The version of emacs,
for instance, that comes with OS X doesn't have *any* window-system
bindings, X11 or Quartz.
It seems to me (and I freely admit I could be wrong), that the
essential purpose of bundling X11 with OS X is to provide
compatibility for non-Apple applications, typically applications which
have been developed for Linux or BSD or Solaris and then ported to OS
X. And not just applications; this encompasses whole work practices,
places that have standardized on X11 for a windowing system and built
accordingly. X11 on the Mac allows these applications to work on the
Mac with less porting overhead than you'd have otherwise. And it
allows Macs to be sold into work centers that might otherwise not be
able to buy them. And, of course, X11 provides compatibility with
the past, with 15 years ago.
What this means is that, when evaluating changes to OS X X11 support,
compatibility should be king, not improvement. Not true for most
things, and that's why OS X works so much better than Windows, but for
X11 I think this is valid.
> If compatibility is a concern, you should stick with a configuration
> that you know works. Why upgrade?
Very true. In my case, I upgraded to see if Leopard was suitable for
some of the things I'm developing, and I'm happy to say that I've
found improvement over improvement. X11 is the glaring exception, and
that's why I'm particularly unhappy over the state of affairs there --
everything else works so well! It's not your fault, I understand and
appreciate, but still -- the x.org version of X11 shouldn't have been
shipped till it was ready. Clearly the right way to go is with the
x.org codebase, etc. It's just not ready yet, and shouldn't have been
part of the release yet.
But the problem this poses for me, as a developer, is that I can't say
to users, "what you need is OS X Leopard". Instead, I'll have to say,
"Leopard after 10.5.3" (or whenever this all gets fixed), or, at the
moment, "Tiger". (Right now, my setup code says, when run on Leopard,
"I'm sorry, but this won't work on OS X Leopard due to deficiencies in
Apple's distribution; please re-install OS X Tiger to use this
software".) The users -- my users -- don't like this, and won't like
this; they've been subject to a year's worth of marketing by Apple
telling them that Leopard is the answer to all of their problems, and
they don't even understand that they are using X11 (in particular, my
application needed Xvfb to be part of the X11 distribution in order to
run OpenOffice macros in the background, because OpenOffice, for some
strange reason, requires an X server to run, even in the background).
They just want their Time Machine, their Spaces.
> > This is why, for example, you want the part of the DISPLAY value in
> > front of the colon to be blank or a hostname, not something else.
>
> Irrelevant.
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.
> Apple doesn't have the cash to blow on paying developers to work on
> software that we don't then plan to release -- on the contrary, they
> would have saved a whole year's worth of my salary (at least) by
> staying with the old X11.app.
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.
> We'd then have people complaining that
> we were neglecting X11.app -- which we had been.
Sure, but you'd have known that they were wrong, and that you weren't
really neglecting X11.app, and that they were just poor souls
suffering from misinformation :-).
So, in conclusion: I think you, Ben, are great, I like the technical
path you're going down, I really appreciate all the community effort
and involvement, and my issues are almost certainly with some aspect
of your management, or possibly with a completely different parallel
group -- not with you. But the X11 in Leopard is giving me grief, and
it's no doubt going to cause me many hours of pointless workaround
work which I could have spent more enjoyably, and I think it's due to
the fact that Apple doesn't understand why they are including X11 with
OS X in the first place. Which is why you get messages like this to
mailing lists like this.
Bill
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