[ubuntu-x] blog post about ubuntu x

[Bryce Harrington]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 09:08:41AM -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:
> http://www.osnews.com/story/21999/Editorial_X_Could_Learn_a_Lot_from_Vista_Windows_7
> 
> He's upset
> a) that resizing a vlc window crashed X
> b) that X crashing crashes the apps rather than transparently restarting
> 
> Good points both... Could have a proxy X server
> that transparantly restarted X and reconnected to it somehow
> to insulate apps from the crash?  Or would it be better
> to build the crash resilience into the protocol, like NFS did?

Yeah maybe, however not something we can reasonably do at the distro
level.  Perhaps a good topic to take upstream.

However we *are* well situated now for handling crashes.  Apport
automatically collects detailed crash reports, and we've got decent docs
on doing it manually if that fails.  Admittedly I've not been looking at
the xserver crash reports a lot recently (too busy with driver bugs) but
in Jaunty I found I could make fast progress on them.

Now, I'm not going to argue that crashing is an appropriate response for
X to error states, however I would suggest that someone with the coding
chops and time to develop the above workaround system could likely fix
most all the known crashers.  (Seriously!)

Bryce