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>Personally I also use X network transparancy a lot, and I would be very sad to lose that.

Taking network transparency out of the core, where it has no business being, does not mean you have to lose it. It would simply need to be implemented in libraries or somewhere at a higher level, with the advantage that the vast majority of us who never use it don't have to "pay" for it.

>Apparently some constructive people feel the same way, because looking at the wayland-devel mailing list there there are apparently some people hard at work right now adding network transparency to Wayland.

This misleading sentence made me nervous that Wayland was just going to be another useless reimplementation of the (IMO, obsolete) X protocol. But [1] seems to clearly indicate that this is not the case. What are you referring to exactly?

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2011-Feb...




X11's network transparency is practically free; users do not "pay" for it in any way (aside from a fractionally larger Xserver binary).


Instead of working the way X does, the intent in Wayland is to do all rendering client side (the way things are done in practice under X these days anyway). Did you see the big thread on the mailing list about "Finishing the network protocol"?


>the way things are done in practice under X these days anyway

Sans the round tripping, which was the main point of this project.

>Did you see the big thread on the mailing list about "Finishing the network protocol"?

Yea I saw that thread, it was just about the protocol they're using. Has nothing to do with X-style network transparency.


> Sans the round tripping, which was the main point of this project.

The "main point" of Wayland has nothing to do with eliminating the (trivial) overhead of network transparency; rather, it's to finally get rid of all the legacy cruft that's accumulated in the X11 protocol over the years.

Much of X11, such as fonts, graphics primitives, and color palettes, is completely unused by modern clients (even remote ones) -- it makes sense to simplify the protocol by dropping such legacy features.


With the disadvantage being it'll be a second-class citizen, like it is on Mac OS X.


Why would a rarely used use case be a first-class citizen at the expense of the use case that is used in nearly all cases?




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