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I wish people would not use the phrase "CADT" like this, it's not relevant, and it's insulting and ableist. Nobody wants to maintain legacy software for free in

by zxzax 5y ago

I wish people would not use the phrase "CADT" like this, it's not relevant, and it's insulting and ableist. Nobody wants to maintain legacy software for free in their spare time. That's all it is. It has nothing to do with the age of the person or the status being "attention deficit," which is a real condition that people actually have and suffer from. If you disagree, you're welcome to spend your spare time working on it. I support you doing that. I really doubt anybody will though, because outside of servers and Android, there is very little interest in doing anything on Linux. If you're willing to listen, I could describe to you the technical reasons why Xorg was abandoned. But I also doubt the answer will please you, because the reality is that the reason it's perceived as being "stable" is because it's not being improved anymore -- if people were still hacking on Xorg instead of Wayland, then your Xorg would be breaking left and right too.

badsectoracula 5y ago
> I wish people would not use the phrase "CADT" like this, it's not relevant, and it's insulting Yes, that's the point of an insult. > Nobody wants to maintain legacy software for free in their spare time. That's all it is. This is 100% false, a lot of people do. In fact a language (Free Pascal) and framework (LCL) i am using has a very good track record for preserving backwards compatibility while at the same time continuously improving. I have code i wrote two decades ago that work fine with it and will automatically get the new features introduced just with a recompile. The same can't be said for, e.g. Gtk: Gtk2 apps not only wont get any new features from Gtk3, but they wont even compile. Same with Gtk4, because making the mistake twice wasn't enough. > If you're willing to listen, I could describe to you the technical reasons why Xorg was abandoned. There are no technical reasons, Xorg is code, code can be modified. It is all political reasons at best and people wanting to rewrite stuff they'd rather not bother learning about. As JWZ writes in his CADT page: <<Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.>> > the reason it's perceived as being "stable" is because it's not being improved anymore -- if people were still hacking on Xorg instead of Wayland, then your Xorg would be breaking left and right too. Xorg improved all the time over the years going back to the XFree86 days, adding new features consistently without breaking existing code and applications. If it suddenly started breaking now it wouldn't be because it is impossible to not break but because the developers somehow started breaking it.
- zxzax 5y ago
  If the point is to look like someone who is unnecessarily rude, I would kindly request that you not do that. Please avoid throwing insults around and starting flame wars. It doesn't help anyone. We can have a good conversation without doing that. That's great that people are doing that with FPC, but if they're continually adding new features and removing deprecated things then that's not legacy software. To illustrate further what I mean, probably none of those people can be convinced to work on other old stuff like GTK1 or GTK2, because you're really comparing apples and oranges here. If it were easy or profitable to do that in GTK, somebody would have done it already. Half the reason things changed is because the entire underlying stack changed along with the hardware -- this is not even remotely comparable to something like a self contained compiler for a programming language. If you disagree, I'd love to hear your proposal on how to keep all the various API changes working in the same codebase without causing it to become overly complex and burdensome, and this is probably over the span of at least 20 system libraries that have all deprecated and/or removed various things over the last 30 years. From my view, part of the problem here is that there were some legitimately bad decisions made back then, that looked reasonable at the time but turned out to be not so great, and nobody really wants to keep paying for those decisions. This is not similar to something like a Pascal implementation where they could just aim for compatibility with an existing compiler from the 1970s and then build on that, these were entirely new APIs at the time and they didn't have their designs fully fleshed out, and in some ways they still don't, because the problem space is still somewhat open-ended. You're wrong that there are no technical reasons, I assure you the technical reasons are real. Again, I can tell you if you're willing to listen, but if you're going to blanket deny they exist, we can't really have a conversation, so I won't bother typing it out. Let me know if you change your mind. In context your JWZ quote doesn't any make sense either, because Xorg got bug fixes for a very long time. It's being moved away from because it's no longer effective to keep doing that, which is the opposite of what that quote suggests. Please don't let rude and dismissive quotes like that be the guiding line of your discourse, let's actually discuss the real issues. >If it suddenly started breaking now it wouldn't be because it is impossible to not break but because the developers somehow started breaking it. This is the root of the misunderstanding -- there is no significant difference between these two. It's at the point where it needs a major refactor or rewrite to make continued work on it worth it, which is going to break things, and at that point writing a new display server makes a whole lot more sense.

by zxzax 5y ago

badsectoracula 5y ago

> I wish people would not use the phrase "CADT" like this, it's not relevant, and it's insulting Yes, that's the point of an insult. > Nobody wants to maintain legacy software for free in their spare time. That's all it is. This is 100% false, a lot of people do. In fact a language (Free Pascal) and framework (LCL) i am using has a very good track record for preserving backwards compatibility while at the same time continuously improving. I have code i wrote two decades ago that work fine with it and will automatically get the new features introduced just with a recompile. The same can't be said for, e.g. Gtk: Gtk2 apps not only wont get any new features from Gtk3, but they wont even compile. Same with Gtk4, because making the mistake twice wasn't enough. > If you're willing to listen, I could describe to you the technical reasons why Xorg was abandoned. There are no technical reasons, Xorg is code, code can be modified. It is all political reasons at best and people wanting to rewrite stuff they'd rather not bother learning about. As JWZ writes in his CADT page: <<Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.>> > the reason it's perceived as being "stable" is because it's not being improved anymore -- if people were still hacking on Xorg instead of Wayland, then your Xorg would be breaking left and right too. Xorg improved all the time over the years going back to the XFree86 days, adding new features consistently without breaking existing code and applications. If it suddenly started breaking now it wouldn't be because it is impossible to not break but because the developers somehow started breaking it.

zxzax 5y ago
If the point is to look like someone who is unnecessarily rude, I would kindly request that you not do that. Please avoid throwing insults around and starting flame wars. It doesn't help anyone. We can have a good conversation without doing that. That's great that people are doing that with FPC, but if they're continually adding new features and removing deprecated things then that's not legacy software. To illustrate further what I mean, probably none of those people can be convinced to work on other old stuff like GTK1 or GTK2, because you're really comparing apples and oranges here. If it were easy or profitable to do that in GTK, somebody would have done it already. Half the reason things changed is because the entire underlying stack changed along with the hardware -- this is not even remotely comparable to something like a self contained compiler for a programming language. If you disagree, I'd love to hear your proposal on how to keep all the various API changes working in the same codebase without causing it to become overly complex and burdensome, and this is probably over the span of at least 20 system libraries that have all deprecated and/or removed various things over the last 30 years. From my view, part of the problem here is that there were some legitimately bad decisions made back then, that looked reasonable at the time but turned out to be not so great, and nobody really wants to keep paying for those decisions. This is not similar to something like a Pascal implementation where they could just aim for compatibility with an existing compiler from the 1970s and then build on that, these were entirely new APIs at the time and they didn't have their designs fully fleshed out, and in some ways they still don't, because the problem space is still somewhat open-ended. You're wrong that there are no technical reasons, I assure you the technical reasons are real. Again, I can tell you if you're willing to listen, but if you're going to blanket deny they exist, we can't really have a conversation, so I won't bother typing it out. Let me know if you change your mind. In context your JWZ quote doesn't any make sense either, because Xorg got bug fixes for a very long time. It's being moved away from because it's no longer effective to keep doing that, which is the opposite of what that quote suggests. Please don't let rude and dismissive quotes like that be the guiding line of your discourse, let's actually discuss the real issues. >If it suddenly started breaking now it wouldn't be because it is impossible to not break but because the developers somehow started breaking it. This is the root of the misunderstanding -- there is no significant difference between these two. It's at the point where it needs a major refactor or rewrite to make continued work on it worth it, which is going to break things, and at that point writing a new display server makes a whole lot more sense.