2 Oct 2000 raph   » (Master)

Ghostscript

Thanks, gtaylor, for pointing me to the LinuxToday posting of my open letter and the followup discussion.

It saddens me that there are rude, thoughtless individuals in Linux land. It saddens me even more that they seem to dominate discussions frequently, especially when it comes to serious issues such as how we're going to manage diversity of choices in desktops and GUI toolkits. I am pretty sure that these flamewars are a manifestation of the "squeaky wheel" syndrome, but the Linux world is changing so fast, it's hard to be sure.

That said, whether to link in a GUI toolkit, or whether to hold GUI interfaces at arms length, is a tough decision. I realize now that I should have put discussion of the XFree86 Render extension into my open letter, as that changes the technical landscape dramatically. When hardware accelerated implementations start shipping, it's going to be amazing.

My heart is telling me that, while I could upgrade the X driver for Ghostscript to do shared memory, Render, and so on, I'd rather share that work with a more generally useful framework than do something completely Ghostscript specific. The framework that has what we need now and is a good base for future work is Gnome.

If somebody has a better idea, I'd really like to hear it. I'm sure we're going to be debating this on the public, archived mailing lists once they're properly set up.

Max

seems to have the chicken pox. It looks like it's a pretty mild case, though. His fever is 100.5, and he's only a little cranky - mostly he's his usual smiling self.

Backlog

I'm backlogged in answering my email again. I really do try to get to it all, but I haven't been very good at it. Sending me a reminder is a good way to get a response. Sorry.

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