[ On Tuesday, November 30, 2004 at 06:29:05 (+0100), Michael Kukat wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Fixes for TGA driver in XFree86 
>
> For security, it's definitely a good approach this way. Bot not for
> flexibility.

Security trumps flexibility each and every time and all of the time.

If "we" didn't care about security then we could run some much simpler
and much faster and much more flexible operating systems and we wouldn't
have to worry about passwords and all that other security stuff that
just gets in the way.


> So XFree86
> is, at least for the flexibility of supporting lots of cards, the better
> approach for users using the machine as desktop workstation.

Traditionally it has always been far more "flexible" for the operating
system to provide good, solid, secure, drivers with uniform and
consistent cross-platform programming interfaces; and for the X11 server
to stay relatively generic (at least within a given line of OS) and
for it to be very simple and easy to use.

"Flexible" in the PC sense has given us the nightmare of "mode lines",
"dot clock" settings, and all kinds of other horrid low-level hardware
magic guck that no user should ever have to see, let alone be aware of.

XFree86?  Just say no.

(mind you, if one has to live in the PC world where there's a new
graphics card design on the market every few days or so then it helps to
have a LARGE team of dedicated developers to hack together drivers for
those cards as quickly as possible -- too bad though that they have to
come in the form of XFree86 and that they don't seem to care or be able
to work with OS developers to put their driver stuff in the kernel where
it belongs)

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
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