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> X11 hides the hardware and allows the app to be independent of it, just as do<br>> Jack for audio, sockets for networking, etc. Do you suggest that I should not<br>> use Jack or sockets because e.g. Windows doesn't have them (natively) ?<br><br>Actually yes, I am suggesting you don't use Jack or Sockets if you want your app to be<br>well written and portable.<br><br>Now, what has this really got to do with hardware? You design an app, it interfaces to some<br>libraries - you talk about hardware abstraction but all the library does is give you access<br>to some features you want. Applications which rely on X to 'distribute' themselves are now<br>totally dependent on the underlying library for that feature because they have no other<br>inherent method of doing it. They are totally dependent.<br><br>This is not abstracting any function, you have just moved your dependency from specific<br>hardware to specific software because you now need _that_ set of libraries to work. You<br>talk about badly written applications but with respect to distribution models, if your app<br>was not architected to support a feature then it was 'badly written' if you consider that<br>feature to be useful. Back to bristol - the engine implements its DSP code because I <br>considered that to be a base requirement of the product, but it also abstracts itself to<br>support a distributed mode because I also consider that to be a base requirement. I did<br>not rely on X11 to provide this feature for me just as I did not rely on any DSP ASIC or<br>specific soundcard to provide my audio interface.<br><br>> And how does Bristol run remotely but with a local display if not by either<br>> X forwarding, or having some ad-hoc code to split the app into two parts ?<br>> The latter has to be redone for each and every application, if you ever<br>> want to use it remotely.<br><br>You are getting off the point here which was the dependency on X11 but I am really<br>honoured that you want to know so much about my software, I truly never realised<br>you were such a fan. I only mentioned it because it highlights that fact that you don't<br>need X to distribute an app but Fons, I would be happy to start another thread if you<br>are that interested in blowing smoke where it isn't supposed to go and suffice to say<br>bristol does not rely on any archaic windowing systems.<br><br>> You're mixing up thing here. Most systems do indeed disable direct connections<br>> to the X server (for good reasons) and expect you to use ssh -X instead<br><br>No, Fons, you are mixing things up. Most systems do not even run X servers. Most <br>systems don't even run *nix.<br><br>Only a very tiny minority are still lumbered with this aged piece of code called X. In<br>my previous post I said that a majority of these systems were not using X in a distributed<br>fashion because it is either disabled, not available (firewalled) or plain uninteresting and <br>I stand by that statement - a few users have replied that they use this feature and that<br>speaks for itself, either a few users of a low volume interest list use the feature or a whole<br>load of people use the list and don't use the feature.<br><br>Now I like X11 but again I am not going to be a fanboy since that smells a lot like every<br>Apple advocate who is blind to the limitations of their beloved products.<br><br>> > > If 'a generation of users' is any reference, we should just forget about<br>> > > Linux, switch to Windows and call it a day. We should also eat only fast<br>> > > food, believe everything the TV news and ads tell us, hate strangers and<br>> > > homosexuals, and generally be ignorant about everything. There's probably<br>> > > no argument more irrelevant than this sort of populist ones.<br><br>So here I agree with Paul - something like wayland is what we will all be on in a few<br>years.<br><br>If you are relying on features of X for anything that you consider to be useful in your<br>apps then you are likely to need some very fundamental changes to what is likely to be<br>the next way of interfacing with your hardware. Now you did ask about models to distribute<br>processing and asked me to quote them: go google it, there are already plenty of<br>very good models out there and they are being used. If you application is 'badly written'<br>as you put it, relying on a given interface for a potentially critical feature then it<br>is going to have problems migrating. It has nothing to do with libraries that use X<br>window Id in their specification, nor apps that work or not with X over SSH. As you well<br>know, if you did not consider a given requirement before the fact then you are going to<br>have problems implementing it after the ract, and offloading a feature onto the X11 <br>libraries because as a fan boy you like the way it abstracts hardware means you are likely <br>to be in for a world of hurt later. At least you do have a few years to put it straight but you<br>do need to drop the benefits of the -X switch.<br><br>Regards, nick.<br><br><br>"we have to make sure the old choice [Windows] doesn't disappear”.<br>Jim Wong, president of IT products, Acer<br><br> </body>
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