Disclaimer I'm a curmudgeon and I think you're clueless. And no, I don't consider it ad-hominem to point out cluelessness, it's a form of ignorance, and ignorance can be cleared up by study. So rather than point out how wrong he is, ask 'what is he trying to say?' and deal with that.
This is an exemplar from your comment that leads me to this observation, you write (first quoting the author):
""Writing X11 programs with xcb and proper RPC APIs like SUNRPC or Thrift should be more than good enough."
This 100% misunderstands why dbus is used. The first goal of dbus is not to send a message from process A to process B; it's to keep track of processes (help A find B, have them each know when the other goes away). The messaging is important but in many ways secondary."
I would suggest that it points out a 100% misunderstanding on remote procedure calls. Your defense of dbus asserts that its primary function is to 'keep track of processes' which would suggest its name should be 'dlocate' or 'dmonitor' but its 'dbus' because most of the traffic on it is like a 'bus' where data goes from point A to point B.
The original author points out that all of the 'features' of dbus which are not directly related to interprocess communication could have been implemented on top of the existant architecture. People have done that, they called them 'location brokers' back in the 80's. And what the folks who invented dbus missed was all of the research about what makes for good network protocols like Andy Birrell's seminal paper on the RPCs or work done at Sun, Xerox, Apollo and elsewhere.
You wrote:
"Overall, the article doesn't understand the big picture of why all this new stuff was needed."
But that wasn't what the article is about at all, it was asking the question why is all the substructure re-invented every time? The author rants at how Linux's tendency to constantly recreate every wheel every time is hugely destructive and wasteful.
The real problem, which is not mentioned explicitly but I suspect is at the root of this entire rant, is that it is infinitely easier to create in Linux than it is to fix. When there is a problem with the way desktop events get delivered you can either fix the broken system or you can invent an entire new one. Too often, for reasons which are not well reasoned or supported, people create. I see three reasons for that:
1) It is hard to have two smart, outspoken, and opinionated people work on the same piece of code.
2) If you can choose between "the person who fixed Y" or the "the person who created Z" on your resume, inevitably people lean to the latter.
3) When all you want is feature 'X' which should notionally come from system 'Y', it takes less work to create a new system Z which does all the things you personally need from Y and has X as a new feature. Than it is to understand all of the users of Y and what they need and then incorporating X into that.
And lets close with this bit, you wrote:
"if someone could show up and make the desktop UI stuff behave well with the "unix way" they would have done it."
They have, Motif and SunTools were both such then, Windows and MacOS are examples today. I think you could successfully argue that Linux is on the brink of proving that Free Software is a fundamentally broken model of software development, and use the window system as the exemplar of that argument. The closest counter example we have is Canonical which, as well all know, is well loved by all folks who work on Free Software.
The linked rant boils down to 'Linux sucks because nobody can be bothered work with somebody else's code.' which is of course an exaggeration (but what are rants if not emotional expressions of frustration through hyperbole rhetoric?). If you cannot see the danger that poses to its lively hood then yes, you are by definition clueless.
Don't know what to tell you. I was in the room and writing the code on a lot of this, and what you're saying doesn't correspond to the whys and the whats that were on the whiteboard at that time.
"It is hard to have two smart, outspoken, and opinionated people work on the same piece of code."
But all the stuff discussed here - dbus, gstreamer, EWMH, GNOME, etc. - has had dozens (e.g. EWMH, dbus), hundreds (e.g. gstreamer) or even thousands (e.g. GNOME, Fedora, Ubuntu) of contributors. And that's not counting all the people that build on top of those things, it's only counting the ones who contribute to them directly.
"it is infinitely easier to create in Linux than it is to fix"
I've always found in open source that it's harder to find people to create, than to fix. I mean yeah, there's a background noise of a thousand 1-person projects being born and dying every day. But the big projects with momentum are full of dedicated people primarily interested in incremental change.
Most of the technologies we're talking about here are in the range of 6-12 years old, with no significant overhaul or replacement in that time. For perspective, Firefox (as "Phoenix") appeared 9 years ago, and Mac OS 10.0 is 10 years old. It feels tough to argue that Linux is moving faster than Apple, Microsoft, Google, web tech, etc. It's relatively stable as OS's go.
Sure, Solaris and IRIX are (were?) even older and there was prior art on all sorts of fronts. If you'd like to argue that the original Linux desktop efforts should have copied more from those: you're probably right on some of the specifics. It's easy to say this or that could be slightly better if you look at a huge piece of software like a full Linux distribution. What counts is the software that exists, not the software we all coulda woulda shoulda written.
There were a few hundred people who probably worked on or around Linux desktop IPC back then, and I think zero argued that SUNRPC was a good option. Maybe it was, and someone could have showed up to prove it in code. They did not. Instead, a number of other systems were coded and tried (MICO, ORBit, DCOP, IPC-over-X11, even SOAP), and in the end dbus caught on as a working solution. By that time everyone had a lot of hard knocks and knew what problems they were trying to solve. All the solutions people tried worked fine for sending a message. That was not what differentiated these approaches. The problems to solve included things like how to cross boundaries between systemwide daemons and user session; how to discover, activate, and track other apps and daemons; licensing issues; a least-common-denominator implementation that all the projects were willing to use; security model; etc. At some point dbus cleaned up everybody's ad hoc hacks and experiments, and now Linux is pretty uniform about using it and has been for years. Is it perfect? Not at all. It was just the first thing to be good enough and it stuck.
If someone comes along and does something legitimately better and worth switching to, then I'm sure Linux will do so, and take a lot of heat for it too.
"So rather than point out how wrong he is, ask 'what is he trying to say?' and deal with that."
Well, I think he's trying to say what he says, which is "please don't write software which requires any of the Gnome/KDE and DBus API. Writing X11 programs with xcb and proper RPC APIs like SUNRPC or Thrift should be more than good enough."
This is nonsense.
The idea to use raw xcb rather than GTK or Qt or HTML: come on. You'd spend months getting to the point where you had crappy buttons and scrollbars working. Replicating user-expected and mandated functionality provided by the toolkits is a multi-year task to do _poorly_. You'd never, ever finish writing your app (and it'd suck, too).
On the IPC front: you'd be adding yet another way to do it and thus more complexity. It's fine to say SUNRPC should have been chosen in 2001, but it wasn't, and rewriting hundreds of apps today is nuts. Whatever your dbus annoyances, you could solve them in one place and fix the whole system.
More importantly, most of the newfangled (= 6-12 years old) crazy ideas that this post complains about, exist for some good reasons that the author of the post doesn't seem to be aware of. You could certainly build a system _involving_ SUNRPC or Thrift that would work. But you'd have to innovate on top with an understanding of the problem space. And what's the end-user benefit of that, at this point in time?
I'd argue it's a big old zero.
But if someone shows that there's enough benefit, I hope a new idea wins on the merits (and the running code).
This is an exemplar from your comment that leads me to this observation, you write (first quoting the author):
""Writing X11 programs with xcb and proper RPC APIs like SUNRPC or Thrift should be more than good enough."
This 100% misunderstands why dbus is used. The first goal of dbus is not to send a message from process A to process B; it's to keep track of processes (help A find B, have them each know when the other goes away). The messaging is important but in many ways secondary."
I would suggest that it points out a 100% misunderstanding on remote procedure calls. Your defense of dbus asserts that its primary function is to 'keep track of processes' which would suggest its name should be 'dlocate' or 'dmonitor' but its 'dbus' because most of the traffic on it is like a 'bus' where data goes from point A to point B.
The original author points out that all of the 'features' of dbus which are not directly related to interprocess communication could have been implemented on top of the existant architecture. People have done that, they called them 'location brokers' back in the 80's. And what the folks who invented dbus missed was all of the research about what makes for good network protocols like Andy Birrell's seminal paper on the RPCs or work done at Sun, Xerox, Apollo and elsewhere.
You wrote:
"Overall, the article doesn't understand the big picture of why all this new stuff was needed."
But that wasn't what the article is about at all, it was asking the question why is all the substructure re-invented every time? The author rants at how Linux's tendency to constantly recreate every wheel every time is hugely destructive and wasteful.
The real problem, which is not mentioned explicitly but I suspect is at the root of this entire rant, is that it is infinitely easier to create in Linux than it is to fix. When there is a problem with the way desktop events get delivered you can either fix the broken system or you can invent an entire new one. Too often, for reasons which are not well reasoned or supported, people create. I see three reasons for that:
1) It is hard to have two smart, outspoken, and opinionated people work on the same piece of code.
2) If you can choose between "the person who fixed Y" or the "the person who created Z" on your resume, inevitably people lean to the latter.
3) When all you want is feature 'X' which should notionally come from system 'Y', it takes less work to create a new system Z which does all the things you personally need from Y and has X as a new feature. Than it is to understand all of the users of Y and what they need and then incorporating X into that.
And lets close with this bit, you wrote:
"if someone could show up and make the desktop UI stuff behave well with the "unix way" they would have done it."
They have, Motif and SunTools were both such then, Windows and MacOS are examples today. I think you could successfully argue that Linux is on the brink of proving that Free Software is a fundamentally broken model of software development, and use the window system as the exemplar of that argument. The closest counter example we have is Canonical which, as well all know, is well loved by all folks who work on Free Software.
The linked rant boils down to 'Linux sucks because nobody can be bothered work with somebody else's code.' which is of course an exaggeration (but what are rants if not emotional expressions of frustration through hyperbole rhetoric?). If you cannot see the danger that poses to its lively hood then yes, you are by definition clueless.