Georgina,
This is uncalled for. Impuning Alan's motives or questioning his Company's
contributions is just unacceptable.
Alan's concerns are very justified. I/you may not agree with all of them,
but they are valid reasons for concern.
Over the years, Sun has made significant contributions to
X code base: just go look at the copyrights. And they are a very active
and valued contributor to Gnome currently (particularly Gnome 2).
So your comments are badly out of place, in my view, and I've
watched/been involved in X from its inception.
My answer to Alan, beyond the answer that Keith has already given,
is that the installed base of Linux systems is now much larger than
Solaris, and XFree86 is justifiably proud of its record of upward compatibility,
which is now 10 years and counting, compatible with a standard set in 1988,
so it is compatible with applications of at least 14 years.
We have a very large user base already using what has been implemented to date, and
breaking this installed base isn't in the cards.
High on the list, as Keith notes, is completion of the extension.
The way all can help is to help with the implementation.and get this all
wrapped up.
- Jim Gettys
From: "G O Economou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 22:05:48 -0400
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [Render] Render in X.org & other Xservers
-----
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Coopersmith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 1:25 PM
Subject: [Render] Render in X.org & other Xservers
> I can't speak for all the commercial vendors, but at least Sun is very
> concerned with stable interfaces, as our OS release cycles are now about
> 2 years long, and while the existing bits of the Render API seem stable,
the
> documentation says that much work remains to be done and it's unclear if
that
> includes changes to the existing protocol/API. Since we promise customers
that
> we only make incompatible changes with prior notice in the next marketing
> release (i.e. Solaris 8, 9, 10, not the update releases that come out
every few
> months), we don't want to be caught adopting RENDER, then finding out that
it's
> changed incompatibly and we will spend the next three years with an
> incompatible version of an extension we added primarily to be compatible
with
> XFree86. It's much easier for us to add incremental, backwards
compatible,
> features, than to make wholesale changes to existing features.
>
> --
> -Alan Coopersmith- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Software Systems Group
I am unaware of Sun's contribution to XFree86 up to this point. Perhaps
Alan you know something I don't. Personally I think this whole diatribe
smacks of a loser mentality.
Sounds like constant whining and complaining and excuses...and you wonder
why Sun is a NINE dollar
stock.
If Render becomes obsolete, could it be market forces have rendered it so?
Could it be that
technology is changing and thus backwards compatiblity is something that
will hamper future progress.
I think you are asking too much and frankly giving very little in return
except the promise that RENDER
and XFREE86 should die a slow and painful death to make it easy for SUN
engineers.
All the best to what was the dot in dot.com
Georgina
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