[indolering]

Exactly. For all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth around replacing X windows with Wayland, no one has stepped up to maintain X.org since Red Hat stopped funding its development. Old code isn't bad because its old, its bad because engineers decided it wasn't worth the minimal effort required to accept and release security fixes.

[orra]

Accepting security fixes isn't sufficient to keep software secure.

In the past few years X.org had some major ancient holes discovered. If the authors of the fixes hadn't bothered writing the fixes, I doubt many other people would have stepped up.

[indolering]

I mean, agreed! But in my mind X windows itself is a major security hole: every application can snoop on keyboard and mouse input of every other application. Beyond simple bug fixes, Wayland is the next step in fixing the more fundamental issues with X.org's architecture.

[jolmg]

Exactly? Their comment doesn't follow at all. cirno asks why continued development is necessary. That isn't addressed at all by telling them to volunteer. They're asking why anyone at all needs to do that. The point being that cairo should be very mature and stable by now.

[saalweachter]

I think the problem is that metaphors have legs.

We like to talk about software as architecture. You design a thing. You build a thing. It is built.

Except, real architecture doesn't work that way, and it turns out metaphoric architecture doesn't either.

If you walk down the street long enough you will eventually see a house that is unmaintained. It wasn't broken to begin with, and no one broke it outright, but over time the paint (and shingles) have peeled, rot has set in, and now the foundation is cracked and the frame is starting to sag.

Even maintenance isn't always safe. Sometimes you're up on the cathedral, fixing the roof, someone flicks a cigarette butt the wrong way and it doesn't matter how well it was architected 800 years ago, it's on fire now.

We thought our digital creations were free from the decay or physical ones are subject to, but it turns out we were wrong, because even if the bits themselves don't actually rot, the digital environment they are living in constantly changes, and it amounts to the same thing.