Dropping X11 VCL backend

[Michael Stahl]

On 29.12.20 12:10, Tomaž Vajngerl wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 3:25 PM Ilmari Lauhakangas <ilmari.lauhakangas at libreoffice.org <mailto:ilmari.lauhakangas at libreoffice.org>> wrote:
> 
>     On 29.12.2020 8.13, Chris Sherlock wrote:
>      > I am interested in knowing the future of the X11 VCL backend now that we have a Skia backend. Are there any plans afoot to remove it and just go with the Skia backend?
>      >
>      > If not, may I ask the reason? It seems maintenance heavy.
>      >
>      > If we are, do we have a potential release where we believe that Skia is stable enough to use and remove the X11 backend?
> 
>     We could start by gathering the concrete things that we use X11 backend for.
> 
> 
> Just for clarification, the idea is to remove X11 graphic drawing backend and use skia instead, but X11 would still be used for windows/frames, so AFAIK gen would still exist, it would just use skia.

oh, that's good to know.

the main value of the "gen" backend for me is that it "always works", because it depends on ancient X11 libraries that haven't changed in years.

there were bibisect repos in the past (particularly ones built on Ubuntu) where the only VCLplug that worked for me was "gen", or possibly the GTK2 one but that was removed already.

i hope that because Skia is statically linked that "gen" will continue with this track record.