> disabled, removed extensions. How many of these are disabled as a result > of actual broken code, vs, how many are disabled because, "we don't like > how it looks"?
Most are disabled because they don't work (and often havent worked for ages, or have been disabled by distributions by default for years and nobody noticed), others are just not shipped by default and probably work (eg Xprint still gets some love now and again). There are other things to think about - eg X extensions that are old and unmaintained often pre-date the world of the 'leet hacker dude' and the coding isn't neccessarily as robust as it should be. Enabling such things by default is exposing people to a risk with no economic justification. Really the only way to maintain an X extension is to have someone who uses it and has a true self interest in keeping it working, whether because they work for a vendor whose customer pays good money for a system that delivers the feature, or because they need it in-house. The extensions are still there in the history of the codebase. It just needs someone who needs that extension to check it out, rebuild test and debug it. If it's cheaper to maintain it than port the code using it then it makes sense for those who can save money to maintain it or pay someone to do so, if not then it's probably time to go. Rational economic behaviour ought to resolve such questions (ok given perfect information I admit) Some of the ancient video drivers would certainly be more expensive to port than to simply replace the few remaining cards for example. Alan _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
