Re: [tlug] Running without Gnome/KDE/xfce/whatever. (was: Ubuntu 16.04-LTS Japanese Text Input)

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 14:44:15 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> wrote:

> Attila Kinali writes:
>  > (I wonder why i can even remember the version?) and these
>  > nice wrappers didn't exist yet.
> 
> Actually, the Debian wrappers go back to at least that time, but they
> were very simple then (and they may actually have been part of the
> XFree86 distribution rather than Debian-contributed).  The most
> important thing they did was handle xauth stuff.  I know that they did
> that much, because I never did learn to do that by hand. :-)

Eh.. I wasn't aware that anything needed to be done with xauth...
I always thought that the session key was automagically generated
by the xserver and one didnt need to touch it, unless one wanted
to allow other machines to connect. But that was mostly solved by
ssh and its x-forwarding a looong time ago.
 
>  > Being self-contained or at least having a low number of dependencies
>  > is not on-vogue anymore. Instead authors make many assumptions about
>  > how your system looks like and lable it as user error when it those
>  > assumptions do not hold. :-(
> 
> Yup.  It makes systems more complex and fragile.  I thought we'd
> learned something from the early stages of GNU/Linux/FLOSS[1]
> development, but apparently not.

I think the old lore is getting forgotten. There is so much stuff
we learned over the past 30-40 years of unix development. But very
little of it is taught at school/college/uni, if at all. And people
don't seem to be interested in the wisdom of old. node.js didn't exist
back then anyways. 

<rant>

And then people start to wonder why our computer systems aren't any more
secure than they were 20 years ago, or actually even less so. While anyone
with half an eye can see that all new "technologies"[1] just repeat the
same mistakes over and over again. It's funny to see how the same exploits
that were fixed for server-client systems appeared in webservers 10-20 years
later. Then another 10 years later, the stuff apears again in the 
web-application world. And now, we are getting the same mistakes in the
IoT world....

[1] I really hate people talking about "technologies" all the time. Nothing
of what they call "technology" is actually one. Silicon is not a technology,
it's an application of the semiconductor technology. Javascript, ActiveX,...
are not a technology, the technology is called programming and is much older.
And the fancy little web-blinkenlights system is not even a technique, it's
an implementation, craftmanship at best... and not even a good one at that.

</rant>


>  > I cannot find that part in the ICCCM (definite lack of chocolate)
>  > but i was sure it was a clear MUST NOT...
> 
> Even if so, you need to be careful about what these requirements mean
> and where they apply.  The ICCCM is specifically about *interclient*
> communication, so doesn't apply to communication with non-X apps, and
> it also doesn't apply to X clients that are communicating about
> conditions that are necessarily local to a given host.  

I fully agree. I don't mind dbus being used for communication between
x clients and non-x applications. That's perfectly fine. That's what
dbus was intended for and does a decent job of. What I mind is using
dbus for everything, even stuff that could equally well be done with
the X11 based IPC systems.


				Attila Kinali


-- 
Reading can seriously damage your ignorance.
		-- unknown