On 4-Nov-07, at 11:31 AM, Jack Howarth wrote: > Peter, > Well then its time for everyone to lobby Apple to spend some > of that iPod and iPhone money that is streaming in on a second > programmer. I must admit that I worry about Apple becoming too > bloated with programmers and becoming Microsoftish. However, > assigning only a single programmer to a complete graphical > environment as a side project is insane. No wonder it took > under the last seeds for X11 to be rebuilt under the new linker. > Jack
Jack, I was simply going to ignore the rest of your comments about X11, ld and so forth, but I find that I can not do so. I doubt very much that lobbying will result in another engineer being hired for X11. When this first came up in December 2005, Apple (in the guise of Dr. Ernie) sent an email to darwin-dev asking for volunteers to port x.org to Mac OS X. Being a marketing person, he managed to make it seem like an easy task at the time. He's good at his job :) Note that not one Apple engineer was working on doing the port at that time, X11 was essentially maintained by the community (where the community was Torrey Lyons). I worked on it for a bit, along with a number of other people, most of them subscribed to this list. We did so outside of Apple, and we did not get that far. We came up with a large patch, that made x.org build, but it did not work. There is only one reason that x.org-7.x works on Mac OS X 10.5, and that is that Apple decided to put some resources into it. Then Jordan Hubbard hired Ben Byer, and the BSD team manager, Kevin Van Vechten, set him to work on X11. Ben took patches from Torrey, and the group that I was involved in, and still had a non-working x.org. He, and the other members of his team spend a lot of time fixing bugs, and finally got it working, albeit with some bugs. This was, for Apple, a significant expenditure on an open source project. It is more usual for them to rely on the community to support open source projects such as x.org. As for the "new linker" that you keep complaining about. This is, essentially, the same linker that appears in tiger as ld64. It is the same linker as has always been used when building X11 on leopard, for all the seeds. The change in libGL linking was done, I am informed, due to a radar about GL performance. Prior to this radar report, X11's GL was the software only Mesa renderer. So, the change was not in the linker, but in X11. Ben Byer, by the way, read your post where you said: "I am extremely disturbed by the utter ineptitude at Apple that let this fundamental breakage occur. Waiting until the very last second to build a major component of Leopard (X11) with the new linker is imbecilic at best (and a dereliction of duties at worst)." He did not take kindly to being called an inept imbecile. I would appreciate it if you could follow up with a public apology to your very public insult, Ben is working very hard, and very openly and publicly. He is not required to do his work in public, nor even to push his patches back upstream, he's not required even to be subscribed to the X11-users mailing list. He does these things of his own accord, and spends a lot of his "free" time on X11. If you wish to see improvements in Apple's X11, you can follow the directions that Ben has posted, check out the sources, and fix the bugs. Peter ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net http://news.gmane.org/gmane.os.apple.fink.devel
