The ati petition

[Lee Revell]

On Sat, 2004-09-04 at 14:45, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I'm not sure it is any worse to be at ATI's mercy than at Xorg's mercy.
> 
> It is true that I could look at the code,
> but I've always found X frighteningly esoteric.
> Is there a simple introduction anywhere?
> [I've been known to compile programs from CVS,
> and even dabble in C++;
> but I always imagined X had more spheres inside spheres
> than Dante's Hell.]

You are correct.  The X code base has the cruft of the ages.  Take a
look at ./lib/Xt/Composite.c.  It looks like they wrote it in C++ and
ported it to C, hacking in class inheritance and what not manually. 
Possibly related to C++ being less than two years old when this code was
written.

I have heard rumors that there is even some Hungarian notation in the X
code.  Horrors...

See the 'warnings' thread for what people are doing about it.

Lee