X11 bashing

[Root Boy Jim]

In <=V6&^Q_.19037 at cheers.Bungi.COM> greg at cheers.Bungi.COM (Greg Onufer) writes:
>
>At least if Les Hill used vt100's he'd most likely produce postings with
>less than 80 characters per line...  it's only courtesy, after all.

Yeah. I hate this too.

>If X is hated so much, where are the alternatives?

The sad thing is that there aren't many. Never having used MGR,
I can't really rate it. It probably doesn't do very much, but
people seem to think it does it reasonably well.

NeWS seems like it uses the right model, but people say it's
really too slow and big to build terminals out of. And perhaps
the language is too awkward; postfix if's are hard to read.

As one who threw many logs onto this fire, I suppose I should
reveal my purpose. One of them was to simply carp about the
trials and tribulations I experienced when I attempted to
implement an X protocol session recorder and playback program.

During this, I learned many nasty things about the protocol.
You could argue that it was not designed for this purpose,
and strictly speaking, it was not. However, truly robust
software often finds uses for which it was not designed.

But I suppose my real purpose in bashing X, just like my
bashing on NFS, is to warn people who don't really know
better against following along blindly with the crowd.

What I am after is for people to examine the issues, to look
beneath the surface and consider the issues. To those who
have done that and still support X, well, someone has to
work on it.

Sure, both X and NFS are useful, even worth using.
But let us tell the truth about their warts.
-- 
		[rbj at uunet 1] stty sane
		unknown mode: sane