On Tuesday 07 October 2003 06:54 pm, Aymeric Vincent wrote:
> "Charles M. Hannum" <abuse@spamalicious.com> writes:
> > At any rate, if they wanted cooperation on this front, they should
> > have fixed it 10 years ago.  It's been broken long enough that,
> > frankly, I just don't care what the excuse is or was any more.
>
> It's been "broken" from the day code outside the responsibility of the
> XF86 group has started using libraries that were never part of the
> visible ABI of XF86. Not the other way round.

My god, man, WHAT are you smoking?  libXinerama, libXss and libXau, for 
example, ARE part of the publically exported interface.  Their only purpose 
for existance is so that applications can use them.

> Anyway, I feel frustrated of arguing on this when it would me so much
> easier to just do what went into the OpenBSD X tree because:
>
> 1. it solves the problem you want to solve

And in the process leaves the code statically linked into countless shared 
libraries and programs, at the very least wasting space, and at worst making 
it very difficult to apply patches.

I mean, why do we have shared libraries at all?

> 2. it will show up in an upcoming XFree release

"Yay rah."

> 3. the other change made us diverge from the official XFree distribution

Every change we make makes us diverege from XFree86, until it's remerged into 
their code base.  So what?  That's a strawman.

> If you agree to reverting the change, I can handle the whole issue in
> three weeks from now (work is taking 99% of my time now) if the main
> problem for you is your time.

No, I don't agree.  It's a bogus solution that addresses a non-existant 
problem.  There is nothing wrong with using shared libraries here, there 
never has been, and the X source tree has always supported it if you use the 
proper options.

Quiz question: In the 10 years that this has been broken -- and actively 
breaking other software -- how many times has there been an incompatible ABI 
change to one of these libraries between releases?