On Jan 16, 2008, at 3:18 AM, Jean-Baptiste Marquette wrote:
Le 15 janv. 08 à 18:00, James Elliott a écrit :
Here's an outsider's perspective, but one who has been following the list with interest since the Leopard release:
Spaces are not yet expected to work with X11. There are higher priority basic functionality bugs being addressed, as well as an effort to catch up with the rest of the open-source code base.
Whether it can be fixed quickly or not depends on how those other efforts go, and more fundamentally, on whether it can be fixed in the open source components of X11 itself or not: There may be issues in elements of the Apple-proprietary libXplugin, or in Spaces itself, which would leave you at the mercy of Apple's own development and release schedule. (And if that's the case, Ben's doing great things on the X side, but the Spaces world is outside of even his control.)
This is not acceptable. In my field and for researchers in general X11 on a Mac is a key issue. I brought several colleagues to switch considering only this point. I think that Apple's credibility is engaged on that topic. The X11 version released with Leopard is a regression compared to that of Tiger. It is their responsibility to converge towards a robust version of all their applications working together.
I don't think you're listening to what he (or anyone else over the last 4 months or so) is saying. He's saying that there are a number of issues with X11 as a consequence of the XFree86->X.org transition, many comments having already been made about why that transition was necessary (and I'll therefore not rehash them here), and that interoperability with spaces occupies a lower rung on the priority ladder than many other issues that need fixing.
Apple has made in an investment in the convergence you speak of (and, hopefully, that investment will be speaking for itself in the months to come) but nothing is going to occur instantaneously. Even if we had an infinite number of engineers working on X11, it still takes a finite amount of time for any engineer to analyze code that is not his or her own and divine its workings (and its bugs). We do take our responsibility seriously, trust me here, but we're still bound by the laws of software engineering physics.
- Jordan
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