On Tuesday 01 of December 2009, Egbert Eich wrote:
The Future of SaX2 ==================
For many years now SUSE Linux came with a tool to configure the setup of the desktop which was second to none in the Linux and Free Software world: SaX2. It made it easy even for unexperienced users to configure video modes, screen layouts as well as keyboard and input devices for the X Window System. Meanwhile however the technology around the X Window System server as shipped by X.Org has evolved: hot pluggable input and output devices made a static configuration infeasible. Automatic configuration and dynamic reconfiguration mechanisms have been developed such that today most of the tasks that SaX2 was able to do are done fully automatically on the fly and can be modified from within a desktop session. Modern desktops like Gnome and KDE provide convenient user interfaces for that. A static configuration of the Xserver as done by SaX2 is still possible, yet it does not work well together with dynamic reconfiguration. The changes to SaX2 to improve this situation would be considerable and will require substantial changes in its design.
Novell has decided to no longer invest in development maintenance of SaX2 but instead rely on the new automatic and dynamic configuration features and invest in desktop applets to perform dynamic changes. Federico Quintero for instance has created gnome-display-properties.
The resources needed to keep SaX2 in sync with changes in X.Org will exceed what the people at Novell who have been maintaining SaX2 next to their normal work tasks in the past few years are able to spare.
Thus starting with openSUSE 11.2 SaX2 will no longer be offered as a configuration option in YaST.
openSUSE 11.2 was released almost a month ago. That not only makes the tense used in the sentence incorrect, but it also makes it hard to do something about the cases which need adjustment. Such as, let me think, the case when one wants to change the global keyboard layout (in xDM) or the case when the KDE display tool is designed to change the screen setup during a session but not quite so to do the initial setup (where one would somehow expect that X's initial setup is X's responsibility). And frankly I'm getting tired of finding out about such changes the hard way, thanks for reminding me that I wanted to bring this up. I'll keep that for a separate mail. As for the actual problem, so what exactly is the theory about how things should be done now? My personal theory would be that X people decided that everything now works automagically and in the case when not those unlucky should be smart enough to know xinitrc, so maybe even some X guy told a GNOME guy in the next office at RH. KDE now will have to do the same and who cares about the rest if they don't know xinitrc, huh? Is that far off or did I guess right? Are now each desktop really to do the X setup during their startup whenever X doesn't get something right? -- Lubos Lunak KDE developer -------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. e-mail: l.lunak@suse.cz , l.lunak@kde.org Lihovarska 1060/12 tel: +420 284 084 672 190 00 Prague 9 fax: +420 284 028 951 Czech Republic http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org