Subject: Re: modular -> monolithic
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.freedesktop.xorg
Date: 2008-01-23 05:52:45 GMT (50 weeks, 2 days, 18 hours and 33 minutes ago)
On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 21:28 -0600, Pat Kane wrote: > In the good old days RWS did that. Where by 'good old days', you mean before 1988. After that point, the X consortium staff (including RWS and me) were paid by the corporations doing the development, and it wasn't (yet) clear that the corporations shouldn't have a direct say in what went into the distribution. Thus we suffered through XKB, XInput, XIE, PEX, VEX, Xt and a wealth of other really bad ideas, along with the constant requirement that 'nothing old stop working'. Shockingly enough, the only things which survive unscathed from that era are things which were *not* developed using this model (Shape and Xv being the only two largely intact and non-trivial extensions that we use today). It's really only in the last couple of years that we've taken a strong stand against some of those mistakes, along with an acceptance that we've still got a lot of catching up to do. Having spent the last 8 years adding a bunch of missing functionality, we're only now starting to work on areas of the system which cannot easily be fixed in small incremental steps. One thing the kernel never faced was fifteen years of fundamental stagnation with a wealth of kludge-arounds piled on top. -- keith.packard <at> intel.com
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