Re: XLibre in Debian

The Wanderer <[email protected]> Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:47:20 -0400
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.project
Organization	This space intentionally left blank.
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 2025-10-04 at 19:46, Philipp Kern wrote:

> On 10/4/25 8:32 PM, Aaron Johnson wrote:
> 
>> From a technical perspective, XLibre appears to offer several
>> contributions:
>> - Long-term support for X server as legacy X implementations lose
>> maintenance
>> - Continued security patches for X11-dependent environments
>> - Maintained compatibility for proprietary drivers where Wayland
>> support remains incomplete
> 
> Can we stop the charade? None of this is true. The maintainer got
> their privileges from X11 removed because they were... not a good
> maintainer and randomly broke interfaces that existing software
> relied upon. And even introduced security issues with some of their
> patches. And XLibre broke compatibility with the one proprietary
> driver that actually matters here.

I would be interested in references for this. I do not doubt that it is
true, but the only reference I've seen thus far which might have gone
into detail about technical inadequacies of the XLibre maintainer(s)
goes through a Website which blocks access from the browser I use on my
primary computer (for site-security reasons, because that browser is
severely outdated - it's a long story, I'm working towards changing that
but it won't be soon).

> Which leaves:
> 
>> - Support for users who rely on remote X applications, specific
>> window managers, or accessibility workflows that aren't fully
>> addressed by Wayland
> 
> No-one is currently arguing for an X11 removal. I don't see how
> that'd require XLibre of all things.

I parse the idea as being something like "because Xorg has been
declared unmaintained or similar upstream, it will inevitably bitrot and
become more and more broken over time, so it will cease to be a viable
option; in order for X to continue to be viable, it will be necessary
for distributions to switch to a new upstream; the only current
candidate for an alternative X upstream which has enough contributor
interest to seem potentially viable is XLibre". Thus the "as legacy X
implementations lose maintenance" bullet point, above.

There are probably multiple unacknowledged assumptions in that, and I
don't know how many of them I could even pull out and make explicit, let
alone how many of them have any validity. I do, however, think that
that's the argument.

To be clear: from what I do know about it at my remove, I am not in
favor of XLibre, do not intend to touch it with a ten-foot pole (despite
being wedded to a window manager which will never get Wayland support,
and to at least one X feature which Wayland AFAIK explicitly does not
support), and would prefer for Debian to not be involved with it either.
I do not, however, even pretend to have any say or sway in that last.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.         -- George Bernard Shaw
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