[comp.windows.x] wailing and gnashing of teeth.

price@DECWRL.DEC.COM (10/10/87)

>Do many people share my frustration with X11?  For the past 6 months I had been
>doing a reasonable job programming some good applications under X10 and was
>looking foward to the X11 release.  After it arrived however there has been
>little other the the the subject line going on here.

Its understandable that things might be a bit frustrating right now. But
keep in mind that if you started using X10 6 months ago, you were working
on software that had been around, in reasonably the same form, for about
2 years. Significant work had already gone into making it perform well,
as well as to provide useful demos. DEC already had a supported product
version, and was in field test of a second release.

The X11 release that you are now wailing over is *brand new software*. The
Sun server is not a high performance implementation; they are working on
that, I suppose. I have been using the DEC server quite happily for the
past couple of months. Yes, there are some bugs, and I know it can go
faster, but it is very useable now.

The XToolkit documentation will improve. What more can I say but stay tuned.

As far as sample code is concerned, my group at DEC is currently putting
some training together. When I am finished with my examples, I'll post 'em
to the net. How's that? (In return, will you buy a couple o' hundred 
VS2000's? ;-)  )

Window Managers: I thought someone ported uwm. Not that I care, I like the
new one. I no longer have to guess how to use someone elses workstation!
(BTW, X10 didn't provide the window re-parenting capability needed to adequately
implement real estate based window managers. So in this area, X11 is a great
improvement).

> Now PLEASE don't take this as a flame...

[Religion alert]
Not at all. (Although my xmh *did* seem to be glowing before I read your
memo :-) ). But regarding your comment about Suntools or NeWS. If Sun plans
to port Suntools to X, then that doesn't seem to be a waste of time, although
the Xtoolkit is a *much* more advanced design. NeWS, however, seems to be
almost as big a waste as X10, or worse. It doesn't look like *anybody* is
going to support NeWS except Sun.
[End religion alert]

-chuck
(DECWindows software evangelist)
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