Problems with X.org and incompatibilities with in-house software

[Peter Hutterer]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 09:18:35PM -0800, Corbin Simpson wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Richard Brown <rbrown1445 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> >> On the client side we've pretty much preserved API & ABI compatibility,
> >> even
> >> when that required major gyrations for the XCB effort - while we
> >> encouarage
> >> migration to the new XCB libraries, it will be a couple decades before
> >> libX11
> >> fades away.
> >>
> >>
> >
> > I do not expect xlib to ever go away. There is so much written for it, its
> > sort of pointless to refactor apps "because we can". If one makes a new app,
> > XCB may be a good choice, when it is mature. I am not sure what benefits XCB
> > has however. It could be as well, the way things often go, someone will
> > forget some needed feature in XCB and Xlib may end up being a better choice
> > in some situations. Ive often seen things like that happen. Case in point .,
> > i upgraded t KDE 4.0. The new Konsole does not take the escape codes for
> > setting the title bar with program name/path name i have sent by tcsh precmd
> > and postcmd. I deleted KDE 4 and went back to KDE 3. Someone didnt
> > understand the importance of this and didnt include this. KDE 4 for me was a
> > downgrade, it actually regressed.
> 
> XCB cannot possibly omit any protocol information because of the way
> it's crafted: It is directly generated at build-time from descriptions
> of the X wire protocol. 

These protocol descriptions may be missing though (e.g. XI is afaik still
incomplete). so even with xcb you might find that what you want to do
isn't possible and libX11 is the only choice for now.

Cheers,
  Peter