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From: swick@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ralph R. Swick)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Comment on Release Notes for X Version 11 Release 1
Message-ID: <8709181211.AA06086@LYRE.MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 18-Sep-87 08:11:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: LYRE.8709181211.AA06086
Posted: Fri Sep 18 08:11:33 1987
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Had your phones been as busy as ours the past few months, you might
feel differently about our schedule.  The figurative "gun" in this
case was the outside world; we are being swamped with requests to
"send everything you can".  We would have liked very much to be able
to take another month or two to clean things up, however in real time
those 2 months would have required 6 while we responded to more
requests for information/pre-releases.

Somewhere in the editing process I had a paragraph about not expecting
XV11R1 to be as shaken-out as XV10R4.  The version 11 protocol is a
significant change/improvement over the version 10 protocol.
Re-shaping applications to take advantage of the new protocol is not
an over-night process.  We fully expect that it will take another
release or two before all the new kinks are worked out.

While we are not enthusiastic about some of the compromises we had to
make (i.e. sending multiple versions of several libraries), we are
confident that this release does meet the "useability" objective.  We
are also confident that the interfaces at the server and Xlib level,
which are the critical ones for application portability, are robust
and that it will be several years (cross your fingers) before another
cataclysm is required.

Were we a commercial organization instead of an academic one, we would
not have slipped the release either; we simply wouldn't have told you
about all the bugs. :-)

As to waiting until Release 2 - it's your choice, but from the mail we've
been getting, you'll be pretty lonely.

-Ralph