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."

Anything else out there?

Is there anything else out there? Why is there such a lack of interest in X.org, when so many other projects depend on it. Most of the big projects have been moving quite quickly, making a lot of headway in the past couple of years. What's holding x.org back?

Re:Anything else out there?

Probably the complexity of the issues involved, and the ever-expanding environmental requirements X is being written for.

Re:Anything else out there?

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

Re:Anything else out there?

Uh, a strange thing to say but your posting history seems normal so...

In February 2004, with version 4.4.0, The XFree86 Project adopted a license change that the Free Software Foundation considered GPL incompatible. Most Linux distributions found the potential legal issues unacceptable and made plans to move to a fork from before the license change. At first there were multiple forks, but the X.Org fork soon became the dominant one. Most XFree86 developers who were already annoyed at other issues in the project also moved to X.Org.

In short, x.org was xfree86 but that project is practicly dead. Pretty much everyone worth mentioning have migrated from xfree86 to x.org and while x.org may be moving slow, xfree86 has almost stopped dead. Going back there would do little to nothing to bolster X development. Tbe question is rather why there's so little work overall (or so it claims, I don't have enough knowledge to say) since the competition is basicly non-existant.

Re:Anything else out there?

Tbe question is rather why there's so little work overall (or so it claims, I don't have enough knowledge to say) since the competition is basicly non-existant.

Wow, you have just answered your question in the same sentence.

Re:Anything else out there?

Open source does not work like big business. It doesn't stagnate because there's no competition. It stagnates because people don't want to work on it. There isn't much competition for the Linux Kernel either. That doesn't slow down it's development.

Re:Anything else out there?

There isn't much competition for the Linux Kernel either.

You mean like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin and OpenSolaris?

Re:Anything else out there?

Wow, you have just answered your question in the same sentence.

The Linux kernel for example, is completely without competing forks that I know of, yet seems to be making good strides. xfree86 was going slow, and even after the x.org revival things again appear to be going slow. With a lot of people focusing on the desktop performance of Linux, why isn't this project interesting? A lot of other projects seem to be progressing nicely even without the competition breathing down their necks. I wonder if part of the reason is that the code is X11 licensed, which is fairly close to BSD so you don't have even LGPL protection of your code. If Stallman is looking for a non-(L)GPL project to replace, maybe he should drop the Hurd and start working on a GPL'd X instead...

Re:Anything else out there?

First, I believe your parent post was a joke. Second of all, the reason most open source projects go stagnant seems to be for a couple reasons. First, the code is an ugly mess, and nobody wants to work on it. Second, internal conflict about where the project is going, so nothing gets done, or every new feature or bug fix becomes a big argument, about how it should be done. Thirdly, very boring project subject matter. The last one seems to be the big killer. There could be a nice open source Outlook/Exchange replacement. It wouldn't be inherently hard to build, but it seems that nobody is interested in doing it. Most of the stuff that gets a lot of attention is the stuff that developers are interested in building.

Re:Anything else out there?

I have a theory.

We're using X as our windowing system because it's what we have, and we need it. But I don't think anybody (or not many people) really *believe* in it.

That is to say, I doubt anybody takes a look at it and says "this is it! This is the way we should do Windowing!" And so the followup, "...and if it this thing worked, then it'd be more awesome."

What people actually say when they start looking at it looks more like this.
"Okay! X.org is a good project! I think maybe I'll contribute my time to it! Hold on...what is this? Why does it have all these features that nobody cares about? Why the nonstandard build system? What's with all the crazy legacy code? This thing is way too complex for me to spend my time on, and what I learn won't transfer to any other work. I'll pick something else."

Re:Anything else out there?

It's a HUGE, and I mean, REALLY HUGE codebase that deals with hell lots of different concepts (graphics, input, networking, ...) that requires a good deal of understanding to modify it properly. Yet, there are less than 30 (!) active developers. That's probably one of the most under-manned Open Source project out there, proportionally to its size. And it's, again, because it's complicated as hell and nothing can be done about this - it's just the way a windowing server has to be.

I've tried to help the project two years ago, I did dome work on input hotplugging and while not much of the code I wrote finally made it to the upstream (Daniel Stone, the man behind the input subsystem, finally decided for a different solution than what I was thinking about - maybe that was a good decision, I'm not the one to judge), I could experience myself how difficult developing X is. Besides skills and experience, you need to be able to keep track of such a big structure mentally, all the time. Not every programmer can do that, even skilled and experienced.

And, no, you can't always abstract everything out and make a nice, clean structure for the code to adhere to. Maybe the X code could be a bit easier to modify, but just a bit. Trying to force that, you would end up with an Xserver counterpart of GNU Hurd, if you know what I mean...

What's the problem?

It's Open Source -- unlike proprietary software, we're not at the mercy of a company to dictate the release schedule or fix bugs if they get around to it. If bugs aren't fixed, it's because we failed to fix them.

Phoronix will pay to fix X

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.

Re:Phoronix will pay to fix X

Bribery? I completely fail to see your logic here.

BattleCat needs to have a bug fixed. He approaches coders who, for free and in their spare time, code.

"Hey there, coderman. I see that you do this sort of thing for free and for fun, but what would you say to doing that coding thing that you love to do, hitting this one bug that I really need fixed, and ending up with all the satisfaction that you normally get from your work and a shiny nickel on top of it?"

"ZOMGBRIBERYYOUCALLOUSBASTARD!"

Really? Is that what you call bribery? Where I come from, bribery entails a breach of ethics. All BattleCat wanted was to add a little icing to the job that people were already doing for free in an effort to have something fixed that was a priority for him. That's about as straight-up, ethical, and non-bribery a way to get things done as I can imagine.

Typical of Microsoft

Oh, wait.

Gots to pay people...

People aren't going to work on X because a lot of developers want to make new stuff, not fix up someone's old junk. So, the only way to get them to do it is to pay them. There's not enough money for that. Bounties are nice and all, but you really need to have a foundation with big money coming in to get the people to actually work on this stuff.

ID games?

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

Paid developers?

Aside from Keith Packard and Dave Airlie, and maybe one or two others, how many paid full-time X developers are there? Watching the mailing list, it seems like there's a couple of volunteers, some people who submit the occasional patch but otherwise work on Qt, or GNOME or whatever, and then the core listed above. I think there just isn't enough manpower right now and the distros, instead of fixing that problem, just maintain their own patchsets and do a "good enough" job to make X work smoothly for their releases, and leave it at that. Clearly, nobody wants to make X a priority and it shows. The Wiki is almost never up to date, it's nigh on impossible to build a working X system from git, even with the couple of half-arsed build scripts available from the mailing list (for my part, I have never been able to get it to build completely, and not for lack of trying or ability). The mailing list is full of academic arguments over color specs and other pointless things, or people asking for help. There used to be a lot of discussion on how to improve X and also, how to get things done. That no longer happens. What the distros and Linux companies need to do is get more people working directly on X and get serious about making X a serious project. It's not just some option piece of software that nobody has to care about. It's only one of the most important aspects of desktop Linux. And it just makes no sense to me that no distros are really spearheading X development. If they don't take the time to make this an issue, X will continue to atrophy, further limiting Linux's potential in the market.

Re:I don't like this

I don't know whats stopping them from fixing the bugs in it.

The salient question would be: What's stopping us from fixing the bugs in it.

Duh

Mostly the time we spend posting on Slashdot.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

Do they still sing "network transparency out of the box" mantra every time someone suggests changing architecture ?

That's the complaint you're going to go with? Seriously? Something that degrades gracefully into the ideal solution (shared mem and unix sockets) for a local-only graphics server?

There's a LOT wrong with X.org right now, even mentioned in TFS. I personally wish they would put a lot more work into the transition to evdev and HAL, so we can get rid of xorg.conf and finally make strides to being as user friendly as "the other" OSes.

But network transparency? You're fighting the wrong battles here.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

But network transparency? You're fighting the wrong battles here.

That is so true. Using Macs myself since a couple years. I have a recent MacBook Pro (mostly occupied by my wife) and an iBook G3 left for my stuff. While I can ssh into the MacBook Pro and do command line stuff fast, I so wish I could simply

    export DISPLAY=skarabrae:0.0

and get actual work done fast!

Network transparency is *the* feature of X.

Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish

Internally, X11 running in local mode works the same way as Apple's window server - using shared memory and local sockets. Hell, even Windows Vista works this way (except using Windows IPC mechanisms instead of Unix ones).

Everyone who suggests changing the architecture of X by removing network transparency is arguing from a position of ignorance. There isn't a faster mechanism for doing a GUI server without either building the windows server into each app (allowing only one app at a time), or building the window server into the kernel (bad idea).

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

I agree wholeheartedly. The current release of X is suitable and works well for me.

The "upgrade every year" mentality is the wrong one to have. They missed their date? Okay, that's fine. As long as they don't buckle under the "release schedule" mentality compromise quality. I may be naive, but I don't know any reason they would want to push/rush their next release.

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

It's not that they missed their date because they were busily fixing bugs and adding new features; they missed it because they're just not doing that much right now. There's no management, there's very little direction, and there's really not that much going on at all. That's not a good thing.