On Thu, 12 Mar 2015, Steve Litt wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I just ran across the following quote, which I think the dng people
> will appreciate:
>
> ================================================
> I'm done with my desktop being someone else's research project.
> ================================================
>
> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/has-gnome-3-decided-that-people-shouldnt-want-screen-savers/

absolutely. I have great esteem of Jamie Zawinski, he is a brilliant
programmer, software designer and visionary of our times, but his voice
has been regarded too often as marginal and fringe in design issues
concerning X11 even earlier and GNOME now, I see, in this decade.

We had some email conversations in the past, as I was still developing
FreeJ which was used in some gigs at his pub DNALounge in SF. I always
loved his unbiased point of view on technology and his pragmatic
attitude. Also about XScreensaver: it is a marvelous collection of
software we should all learn from, since it managed to gather a large
amount of contributions in a sustainable way: that is using process
separation in its architecture. This solved the huge security
implication of having a screen-locking plugin to crash and shows us
sinners (me in primis, as I'm maintaining the frei0r video plugin
collection) that binary linking using dlopen() is a long-term tar-pit
for our software designs. AFAIK even LADSPA developers see this as a
limitation in their design.

The large original XScreensaver collection counts the contribution of
many well known programmers today and represents an enjoyable pool of
creative visions, I see it is preserved as functional by Xfce4 and in
any case we should do anything possible to have it working in Devuan

ciao


p.s. Jude, Gravis, regarding your IPC discussions on IRC the other day,
please do not understimate the importance of process separation in your
design. But I bet you do undestand this very well already...