I think this raises an important point which I've been meaning to comment on, as Ben's indirect boss at Apple.
First, Ben is going a great job interacting directly with the community here and you should all be thanking him for putting in the countless extra hours required to do that. Ben has other responsibilities besides X11, so you're getting a fair bit of his free time here in addition to time on Apple's clock. Kudos to Ben.
Second, while no thanks are expected or necessary, I think Apple should at least be acknowledged in some way for spending as much engineering time as it has on X11 and not hiding Ben in a corner, away from the harsh light of public inquiry and questioning, as it is more typically prone to do with its engineers. Those who are somewhat preemptively demanding that "Apple should do even more" are losing sight of both that fact and an even more important one: X.org is the keeper and primary owner of these bits, not Apple.
Anyone wishing to inspect, build and hopefully improve X.org's support for MacOSX, or any other platform X.org supports, are always more than free (nay, outright encouraged) to go to X.org's git repository and check them out. Ben has even helpfully checked the Leopard support in on a branch as well as merging that same support into Top Of Tree, where it is currently and unfortunately somewhat less than functional due to other changes the X.org developers have made there. Version skew is an engineering fact of life so there's not even any implicit blame in that statement, it's merely a statement of fact. It's also a tacit reinforcement of my earlier statement that Apple does not own or exert significant control over the X.org bits and I doubt that anyone would wish to change that fact, least of all Apple. It does, however, mean that you're all far more in control of your own "x11 destinies" than you might think and equating X11 to something like, say, Quartz in terms of setting support expectations would just be silly. Apple bundles X11, Apple contributes what engineering resources it can to the X.org project, that's the long and short of it.
I also realize that this is a mailing list devoted to users of X11 and users by almost categorical definition are somewhat demanding. That's fine. We're all used to that and, as engineers of any stripe, are genuinely happy to see users using our stuff (without which there wouldn't be much point to it). I only hope that those developers also lurking on this list will get the not-at-all-subtle point I'm trying to make about how to really advance the cause of X11 on MacOSX or any other platform for that matter. X.org has some lofty goals, the loftiest of which may be X12 (see http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12), and they're not going to get there on MacOSX or any other platform without significant community involvement. That's you. :-)
- Jordan
|