Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!lethe!yunexus!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!agate!shelby!csli!poser
From: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: X11 for the NeXTstation
Message-ID: <17201@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 15 Jan 91 20:04:05 GMT
References: <2014@autodesk.COM> <17167@csli.Stanford.EDU> <1991Jan15.133940.5618@uncecs.edu>
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 35

In article <1991Jan15.133940.5618@uncecs.edu> jfreem@uncecs.edu (Joe Freeman) writes:
>As I understand it, you folks did an X port that TAKES OVER the frame buffer.
>NextStep vanishes and you hot key back and forth.  There are a couple of real
>problems with doing that:
[Reasons 1 and 2 ommitted].
>3)	It violates one of major look-and-feel portions of the system.  
>	"A user always has a familiar environment in front of them".
>	One of the strong points of the system is this consistency.
>
>Judging by your posting, I doubt if any of this will change your opinion but
>I thought other folks should know some of the problems with the approach.

First, if you will pay attention to my posting, you will see that I have
nothing whatever to do with any X implementation for the NeXT. I want one,
but I'm not doing one. And I have not advocated any particular approach
to the implementation. All I have said is that I need X and probably won't
buy a NeXT if I can't have it. I've also said that it looks like Pencom's
implementation solves my problem. 

But I would like to respond to disadvantage number (3) above, on two
levels. First, I think that "consistency", is greatly over-rated and
ill-defined, as Jonathan Grudin has pointed out in his recent papers.
Second, the fact is that there are a lot of interfaces out there and
that many of us don't want to be bound to NextStep. NextStep is very
nice in many ways, but it is more important to me to be able to network
to non-NeXT machines and to be able to run software not developed on the
NeXT than to have a 100% consistent interface.

I also note that interface issues are to a considerable extent separable
from window system issues, as X illustrates rather well. How about
a NextStep implementation on top of xlib, so that people who like NextStep
can have that interface for their X software, on and off the NeXT?


							Bill