pogma

I have now installed leopard GM on my macbook, so far things are going well. But the new X11 does not appear to be as popular as I had assumed.It does have some pretty major bugs:

1. Fullscreen does not work (I never really used fullscreen, so it is not an issue for me)
2. If you don’t have a three button mouse, you may have some issues, modifier keys do not work.
3. xinerama does not work.
4. The Applications menu has issues.
5. Broken with spaces (I never really expected that people would expect this to work, but they do)
6. xterm does not do unicode

Now, this is disappointing, but remember that people have been complaining for quite a while that Apple’s X11 is ancient, and have been requesting that Apple upgrade to the latest x.org. They did that, and it was a major change, so there are bound to be bugs. Would it be better I wonder to have all the old known bugs forever?

The integration with launchd has thrown a few people also. The DISPLAY environment variable is set when you log in, it points to a socket that is controlled by launchd. As soon as any application accesses the socket X11 will launch if it was not already running. So you can double-click on an X11 app in the finder, and it will start X and run. Pretty darn cool. People who set DISPLAY in their login shells without testing if it was already set have had issues.

Ben Byer has not yet learned that he is not required by his contract to provide help and support on mailing lists, so he has been busy answering questions and being polite, even with all the vitriol on the x11-users list, when he could have just stuck with dealing with formally reported bugs. Some seem to believe that he’s the head of an X11 team within Apple, I’m sure that he just wishes he could devote more of his time to X11.

Today there was more friendly discussion, Ben has asked for help and patches, and there was someone looking for the sources to xterm so that they could fix the bug that bothered them (and then give Ben the patch so that everyone could benefit), now if everyone with a pet bug would download the source and fix their issue we would have a better X11 in a much shorter time.

Apple has committed their changes to upstream git, and hope to eventually do all development in the freedesktop.org repository, with bugs also at the freedesktop bugzilla (open bugs, none of this closed radar crap), so I have nothing to complain about. There are bugs, some serious, if one really bothers me, I will attempt to track it down and fix it. If a bug bothers you, why not do the same.

• http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2007/Oct/msg00201.html
• http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2007/Oct/msg00214.html

Update:

Ben took off his Apple employee hat and made a private release of sources and an Xquartz binary that has a number of bug fixes. How’s that for service!

• http://www.x.org/wiki/XDarwin