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Comment by dingdingdang | Hacker News Reader

Wonder how these play out against the https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver base, would be interesting to hear from that end as to how these things are handled. My understanding is that they address any sec issues that arise on x.org but it would be fascinating if the issues are already mitigated since XLibre updated their xserver port with 1000s of issues that were never addressed on the x.org side of things.

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On their github you can see all three changes identical to x.org's happened on October 28th (same day as the advisory). So, they were not already fixed, but the fixes were applied immediately.

XLibre looks nice with lots of work happening in only 5mo.

The problem with XLibre is political, not technical. When they came out they made a big deal of being the anti-woke free-speech no-vaccine-mandate alternative to woke cancel-culture Xorg, which instantly ruined their reputation before it even began.

Such an unforced error given how irrelevant any of this is to their project.

That project is a pipe dream. They don't have what it takes to continue X11 alive once X.Org pulls the plug.

I bet you are the life of the party. Seriously though, what makes you write that so matter of factly?

That's the fork where the primary cause was to be "anti-woke", right? Honestly it seemed like it was just because that one guy was a little unbalanced, and he happened to be channeling that energy into an X server fork.

no the primary cause was that the main xorg project wasn't accepting the devs patches any more.

... because this dev's patches broke master, multiple times.

I feel this is an important detail to keep in mind while choosing a fork.

which mattered because everyone pulls from master, because xorg stopped doing proper releases. it's certainly something to bear in mind if you intend to run xlibre though.

I don't think "everyone" pulls from master - "everyone" run the distributions, and they always pin to the specific git commits. Only people who run xorg master are the ones who want bleeding edge, and those would be using it no matter release or not.

And it's not like metux will suddenly become more careful just because he does not have to worry about other anymore. If anything, I expect there to be much faster changes and much more breaking things... Here is a great quote [0]

> @metux that you've had to fix this bug twice (!1844 (merged), !1845 (merged)) shows a lack of attention and care. This was a known regression, with clear reproduction steps, and at first glance, it does not look like you tested your PR at all.

> And that goes in general; I really haven't seen the level of care and attention I would expect to see in these patches; several of them had obvious buffer overflow issues that would have easily been caught if tested.

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797#no...

I'm not even trying to say they shouldn't have kicked him out, just that it had nothing to do with wokeness, and more to do with philosophy of how the project should be run.

And he blamed wokeness.

sure, he's a bit of a kook, but wokeness itself is really incidental to the whole thing.

On the github, he points to this document:

https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/blob/master/HISTORY.md

Doesn't mention "woke" but the style is reminiscent to me from grandiosity/paranoia issues

From the README: ``It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.'' and ``Together we'll make X great again!''

These are both phrases used by people who are anti-woke (I guess asleep would be the proper term).

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