Daniel Stone wrote:
Hi Richard,
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 05:48:50PM -0500, Richard Brown wrote:
To our much dismay we have recently found after attempting to install
new Linux boxes that these extensions no longer appear to be available.
This has caused most of our internal applications to blow up and to be
completely ruined and unusable in the process. Dozens of applications
have now blown up and are not able to be used, involving millions of
lines of code. Thousands of dollars already invested in upgrade to new
Linux systems appears to be completely useless now, as none of our
applications can be used on these new systems.
We advertised the deprecations fairly widely, and it was done in a
staggered manner. No-one complained.
It is well past time that your organisation make backwards compatibility
with core X11 and all extensions to it a primary principle of your
organisation. To many have invested too much money into developing
software to utilise these extensions than to have them mindlessly
removed and thus blowing up dozens of our internal applications.
We have decided that we will probably move to an entirely Win32 platform
instead of investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into an extensive
rewriting of our existing X applications, as it seems like, from what we
have already seen, it no longer seems as though we can count on this
platform to provide the backwards compatibility we need. We have been
talking to Microsoft extensively about this issue and they have indeed
provided us with huge resources and have iron clad commitments to
maintaining compatibility with their older interfaces, so we can rest
assured that with them that code we write today will still work years
and years from now.
The key here is in what you've said -- you're paying Microsoft to make
these things happen. If you want to pay a competent UNIX vendor (Red
Hat or Sun, basically), then I'm sure they could help you guys out.
It's pretty hard to do anything when you have to guess as to what
someone who you've never previously interacted with is going to say in
several years' time (when did PEX and XIE disappear -- late 1990s? early
2000s?). But I'm pleased to announce that old versions of X still work
every bit as well now as they do previously, so if you don't want to
upgrade then no-one's holding a gun to your head.
Cheers,
Daniel
(PS: Ask Microsoft how you go running 16-bit DOS applications under
Windows 7.)
Thank you for your help, on this matter. I do apologise for the tone of
the previous letter. I had just gotten back from a bar and was rather
drunk. Anyhoo, I am not of asking X.org to maintain these old extensions
which have functionality available elsewhere or no longer provide
functionality, and have broken or questionable code security wise.
We will be staying with X.org. I am very high up in the decision process
at our corporation (though i do try to avoid making decisions while i am
drunk), so that decision is quite final. Our applications are not too
dependent on these extensions and we are planning to update to fix our
apps to not use them and keep them running.
I apologise if the previous letter was ill conceived. Many of my
statements were made in poor judgment and were ignorant. I will admit
that. (one too many of the cold ones in one evening can do that, i need
to break my drinking habit and attend my AA sessions more frequently).
I do think that x.org is a wonderful product and i do appreciate it. I
do appreciate backwards compatibility in the core protocol and the
network transparency is very useful to us.
I am interesting in helping with X development, but i do not know the
sligthest thing about the X server, any pointers to explanation of X
internals?
Thank you for the great window system and keep up the good work.
Sincerely,
Richard Brown
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