Alternative X upstreams (was Re: XLibre in Debian)

The Wanderer <[email protected]> Sun, 05 Oct 2025 08:18:48 -0400
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.project
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Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 2025-10-05 at 01:53, Vincent Bernat wrote:

> On 2025-10-05 02:47, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>>> 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).
> 
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797 (I also had
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1760 in my
> history)

Thanks. I'll look at those.

>> 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.
> 
> An alternative could be https://wayback.freedesktop.org/.

Yep - I'm keeping a (distant) eye on that with some interest. I first
heard about it in the same context as where I first heard about XLibre,
and have the impression that it either was started in response to the
announcement of the XLibre project, or at least was pushed by that
announcement into announcing itself / going public sooner than it had
intended.

Last I heard there may still have been some uncertainty about whether,
and if so how, it will be able to provide the X features (I think
there's more than one?) which Wayland as a backend does not provide -
but I remain hopeful.

I am definitely looking forward to seeing Wayback become available in
Debian, whenever things are sufficiently Ready for that to happen. (If
I'm not mistaken, all hits on that term in the current testing archive
are references to the Wayback Machine.)

> Also, there is no plan to sunset XWayland.

From what I understand (and I would be *very* glad to be wrong about
this), XWayland does not cover some use cases which a full X server
would, including the use case of running a long-tail window manager
which lacks Wayland support (that being the one I currently care about).
I believe it's my understanding that this is precisely the reason for
the creation/existence of Wayback.

(I can imagine a scenario in which the idea would be that the former
developers of Xorg would effectively be continuing to work on and
maintain X, just in the form of XWayland rather than of Xorg, and that
it would therefore be possible for downstreams of Xorg to just pull and
adapt patches from there in order to get the benefits of continued
maintenance. I don't know whether that scenario has any correspondence
to reality, however.)

-- 
   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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