Question about the future of Xorg

[Vladimir Dergachev]

On Sat, 5 Jul 2025, gene heskett wrote:

> On 7/5/25 01:32, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:
>> There are many developers having fun with Xorg. Some on the list, some not, 
>> some will reply to you, some not.
>> 
>> There might be some that are employed to work on Xorg. In USA that usually 
>> means two weeks notice, so that is the total extent of the "commitment".
>> If they have to switch to a new job it will likely displace any open source 
>> contributions for at least a month.
>> 
>> People having fun produce good code. Don't mess with it.
>> 
>> best
>> 
>> Vladimir Dergachev
> Rant on:
>
> And this, Vladimir, is the clearest, most concise description of the problem 
> I have seen.  My path thru life has been that of keeping a television station 
> on the air and profitable. Along that line I have coded up a couple projects 
> on "company" time. Projects the station needed but no one sold. So I bought 
> the hardware and wrote the code.  Then sold them the hardware.   Code that 
> turned out to so handy it was used for decades.

Nice!

> That is/was unheard of, 
> control room hardware gets replaced by competitive pressure or mechanical 
> wear out years before the tax write off is complete. TV news people are hell 
> on hardware, but get the story regardless. But as quick as I could get the 
> parts, they got the busted ($7500 to repair) camera back to go wreck them 
> again. Now I'm 90 and 23 years retired and it would take me the rest of my 
> life to wrap my head around a quarter of the code xorg maintains.

No problem then:)

You don't actually need to mess with a quarter of xorg code, as most of 
xorg works just fine. The only problem that might arise is lack of support for 
newer cards.

This is an issue we had before 25 years ago, and as Carsten and Alan 
explained to me is much easier now as Wayland compositors don't have their 
own drivers at all, but rather use mesa and other kernel interfaces.

So, if necessary, it should be possible to write an Xorg driver that does 
the same.

best

Vladimir Dergachev