Re: Xorg vs Wayland (and MIR?) - future for NetBSD X ?

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> Well, as someone who's done two ddx layers [...],
> Heh, you don't need to qualify, I know the Mouse has a long and
> hard-fought list of street cred and hard-code pedigrees. :-)

Well, I _was_ writing for list consumption. :-)

>> my answer is twofold: (1) "because the off-the-wall platforms have
>> documented video hardware"
> Isn't it a cryin' shame that so much logic goes into the driver these
> days that all the vendors consider it super-secret?

Actually, I think there are two major reasons for that secrecy.  One is
that the vendor is ashamed of the extent to which their hardware is
buggy with the bugs worked around in software.  The other is that they
have trade "secrets" licensed from someone else embedded in there.  (I
put "secrets" in quotes because such things are secrets only from those
ethical enough to care about things like copyright licenses.  Like copy
protection back in the day, it hurts substantially worse the people who
aren't part of the problem anyway.)

I also find it plausible that a minor reason is that they don't want to
do anything close to actually supporting the interfaces exported by
their hardware, and, since the market will let them get away without
it, they don't.  See below about the market having changed.

> Also it's disappointing that graphics vendors see zero advantage in
> publishing specs or even working very hard with external projects.
> As you point out, they used to.

This I mostly ascribe to the market changing.

> Then again, I used to buy stereo gear that came with schematics.  I'm
> still butthurt about that going away, too.

This too, to an extent.

Time was, the major reason to buy a computer was to program it and/or
hack on the hardware.  Most of the market had no interest in
undocumented anything, so of course makers provided full documentation.
These days, those users - while probably about as large a set in
absolute numbers as ever - constitute so tiny a fraction of the market
that they are lost in the noise, so nobody tries to sell to them.  I
recall, elselist, a longtime listmember describing going to a computer
shop and some salesdroid gushing about how some computer would browse
the web and handle his email and his pictures and his music and so
forth, never even mentioning the one thing he actually did want to do
with it: program it.

As for stereo gear, I think it's partly that same effect and partly
greater levels of automation making stuff less field-repairable,
whether by repair shops or by end users.  And it doesn't help that, in
some places (the USA in particular), the legal climate has changed in
that manufacturers are now held legally responsible for preventing
idiots from suffering the natural consequences of their idiocy.

>> "Modern" X has lost a lot of what gave its roots such staying power.
>> For example, it appears to no longer care about anything but 24bpp
>> TrueColor hardware.
> I didn't realize that.  What is the current fashion?  Doing
> everything at 16BPP?

24.  When it's not doing everything through GL.

Near as I can tell, at least.

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