The State of X.Org

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has up an article looking at the release of X Server 1.4.1. This maintenance release for X.Org, which the open-source operating systems depend upon for living in a graphically rich world, comes more than 200 days late and it doesn't even clear the BugZilla release blocker bug. A further indication of problems is that the next major release of X.Org was scheduled to be released in February... then May... and now it's missing with no sign of when a release will occur. There are still more than three dozen outstanding bugs. Also, the forthcoming release (X.Org 7.4) will ship with a slimmer set of features than what was initially planned."

Re:Anything else out there?

[larry bagina]

I agree. I recently discovered the xfree86 project. It seems like a good alternative to x.org.

Typical of Microsoft

[elrous0]

Oh, wait.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Anonymous Coward]

*whoosh*

ID games?

[couch_warrior]

Clearly X.org is being held up because it is the new game engine for "Duke Nukem Forever"....

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

At Phoronix we are even willing to offer -- cash and/or computer hardware -- bounties for having X.Org release schedules met and bug lists being cleared out.

1. Clear bug list by deleting all unfixed bugs from tracker.
2. Release new version of X.Org, exactly the same as the old version.
3. Profit!!!!

Duh

[Gazzonyx]

Mostly the time we spend posting on Slashdot.

That what's wrong with Open Source

[DrYak]

Pfff !...

Those pesky open-source project. Always speaking about their wonderful communist idea, but never able to ship software on schedule, always dropping features or postponing them to the next release. Never working hard enough to meet their users' expectations.

They should take example on legitimate hard-working commercial corporations like.. uh... Microsoft for exa...
No, wait !

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[kunwon1]

If I give you five bucks, will you go away?

Well, excuuuse me!

[Chemisor]

Well, excuuuse me! Blame the community. I would blame the code instead. I happen to be one of those few people who actually wanted to contribute something. Specifically, there was this bug where the server would crash after a VT switch, so I thought I'd take a look. Have you seen the X.Org tree? It's not just huge. It's unreadable. I honestly didn't even know where to start. Documentation was minimal. If you wanted to trace one of your Xlib calls, you wouldn't be able to. There are modules, but they don't seem to have any clear purpose. There are libraries that are wrappers around something which is a wrapper around something else. Try and find the real code! I dare you! Even just building the damn thing is a major ordeal. With the current XOrg tree from git, I can't do it at all. Yes, that's right: I can't even compile it, and that ought to be the simplest thing you can do with a project. You want to know why I'm not helping the XOrg project? Because it's a pile of steaming crap, that's why, and I have better things to do with my time than trying to build a windowed skyscraper out of it.

Re:Haven't really noticed any reduced quality ..

[andrewd18]

Umm...Windows? 70's?

Ummm... Average US lifespan of 75 years?

Re:Anything else out there?

[larry bagina]

Smelly hippies?

Re:Anything else out there?

[ewoods]

Glad that was modded as funny. Wow.

X.org should scrap the network transparency cruft. It's never worked well, been a slow performer and is used by a small portion of the user population. It's been supplanted by better tools such as vnc and nx (better as in faster, easier to use, more widely accepted). Scrap that and it would make X.org a lot easier to maintain and use. It doesn't have to implement everything in the protocol specification and that's one thing that could go the way of the dodo.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Rob Riggs]

Seems a bit derogatory to call the BSD, OpenSolaris and Darwin users "smelly hippies". Not all of them are like that.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful, I've heard that BSD is dying.

Re:Anything else out there?

[m.ducharme]

I for one, welcome our irony-lacking Overlords.

Re:Anything else out there?

[fastest fascist]

Seems a bit derogatory to call the BSD, OpenSolaris and Darwin users "smelly hippies". Not all of them are like that.

Not all of them are hippies?

1 Million Monkeys

[suggsjc]

That maybe true, but not the number of monkeys...

I think we should take the same approach to streamlining the code base as we have taken with rewriting the entire works of Shakespeare...lets just get 1 million monkeys and let them have at it. We'll just snapshot their work every hour and try to compile it. If it compiles, then just do a blind commit.

Eventually, you'd have a perfect software release that fixes all bugs, and even adds in new features that users haven't even thought of yet!

So are they...

[gwolf]

Smelly yuppies?

Re:Anything else out there?

[kosibar]

Okay, so here's an idea...

We should revive XFree86. To start, we should generate a list of features for the next release. We'll spread some rumors about what we're doing, let the world see how hard we're working on it.

This should get some attention from /. and other sites to get people involved but we'll freeze the code and not allow any new developers/submissions on the project. Frustrated, they'll go over to X.Org to try to work for the competition.

Now for phase II. About this time next year we announce a release date, delay it a few times, then release it about two years from now. Make it a big deal. Major release. Get everybody talking about it.

For the release we'll drop all of the major new features on the list. We'll fix a bug or two, something major like a spelling error in a log report. Of course, we'll add a few new bugs. We could drop support for some hardware. For new features we could change a few things in the conf file. Instead of "Section" you now have to use "Block". We could totally change the format of the ModeLine to something totally crazy (crazier?)

If this follows the corporate model we have today it should drive major innovation and more frequent releases from X.Org, though our XFree86 project would unfortunately take away most of X.Org's market share.

Open source projects would probably earn the respect of more businesses and government agencies if it would just follow these common sense models from the corporate world.

Re:Anything else out there?

[Luyseyal]

It isn't well known, even geeks might not know exactly what it does (i.e., where the separation is between X, the window manager, and so forth), and for some reason it lacks the 'coolness' factor of the Linux kernel.

Oh, what sad times are these when even persons calling themselves geeks do not know the difference between X, the window manager, windowing toolkits, etc. There is a pestilence upon this land. Nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.

-l

Re:Anything else out there?

[larry bagina]

Yep. We recently swapped our production servers (from gentoo) to FreeBSD. Most of the senior linux admins quit in protest (they spent all day recompiling kde and testing themes so no big loss). Withe FreeBSD, we've seen better performance under heavy loads, but more importantly, that overwhelming stench of rancid pizza and dorito farts is gone.

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

[Rogerborg]

Can I have your Compound after The Man comes for you?

Re:Anything else out there?

[kipman725]

Don't forget GNU HURD.. now with 120% more feedom!

Re:Anything else out there?

[0xABADC0DA]

Personally, I'm still unconvinced that X is a particularly "good idea." 15 years later, and the promises of simplicity and compatibility are still unrealized, as every single implementation of the protocol has suffered from numerous problems. Perhaps it would be best to start from scratch, and revise X11 to be a more realistic/practical specification.

The main problem I think is that X is written in C. Originally the X server did graphics itself, scan converting lines and such, so it had to be in C (and there weren't many real alternatives then). Now all it really does is manage a lot of information -- and C is a really really bad language for managing lots of information. Even a simple desktop has over a thousand "windows" that all have position, change listeners, and other properties. Then there are all the bitmaps, pens, backing stores, repaint regions, etc. Events, queues, messages.

The X server should be mostly scrapped and rewritten in Java. Java is a language that is suited for managing information like that, while still being high-performance (enough). The server could be rewritten in C++, but C++ is messy and is a complicated and archaic language at this point anyway.

Take a look at for instance weirdx [jcraft.com] which basically one person did. It handles most of the core functions of X and plenty fast (of course it is incomplete since it is one person's hobby). Or see Sun's Project Looking Glass, an opengl X server written in Java -- that was also written in one guy's spare time. With more development on these they could be real competitors to X.org while being more approachable, and I'll bet faster than the C code.

Re:Anything else out there?

[bsDaemon]

Don't forget GNU HURD.. now with 120% more feedom!

and -130% installed base!

Re:Anything else out there?

[moosesocks]

The X server should be mostly scrapped and rewritten in Java. Java is a language that is suited for managing information like that, while still being high-performance

I'm confused. Do I mod this as "Funny"?

New windowing system?

[CAIMLAS]

Might this not provide the opportunity for a complete re-implementation of the windowing framework used for Linux and UNIX systems?

Granted, replacing something that's been in use for 40 years will be a little difficult, but it seems to me that we could do, roughly, what Apple did with OS X: provide X as a supplement to run "legacy" XWindow apps.

I'm not intimately familiar with the internals of X or the window managers, but I'd think that, while it'd be difficult, it'd certainly be possible and probably easier for the various TK developers to interface with a new system, written from scratch and designed with modern concepts, as it would be to "fix" the fundamental shortcomings in X. This way there could be a transitionary period where apps could simply be rebuilt for the new architecture.

(Maybe I'm simplifying things a wee bit through lack of knowledge, but this seems at least tenable to me given the number of people who are interested in working on X, but are held back by the antiquated architecture and design inherent in X.)

Likewise, it would be possible to retain some degree of "remote X" type functionality by implementing something technologically similar to MS's RDP.

Re:Anything else out there? Sail or Rebuild....

[davidsyes]

"but do you keep sailing a sinking ship, or try to build a new one?"

But, the submarine community does BOTH...

Re:Anything else out there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, what sad times are these when even persons calling themselves geeks do not know the difference between X, the window manager, windowing toolkits, etc. There is a pestilence upon this land. Nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.

"Nu!"

"No no, it's not that; it's Gnu!"

Re:Anything else out there?

[tehcyder]

I prefer to avoid false dilemmas couched in inappropriate analogies to physical constructs

So, what you're saying is that given the choice between a SUV and a racing bike, you'd take the hat-stand?