GUI systems

[Norman Hardy]

At 22:56 -0400 00/06/26, Kragen Sitaker wrote:
>Shawn T. Rutledge says:
>> On Mon, Jun 26, 2000 at 05:18:09PM -0700, John C. Randolph wrote:
>> > Actually, this is the overriding reason to avoid using X, IMNSHO.
>>EROS is
>> > a clean slate, and a GUI for EROS should not be a legacy turd like X.
>>
>> . . .  It's over-homogenized, and I'm here in the hope that we have
>> a real frontier, not just another desktop.
>
>In general, the more frontiers you are pushing, the slower and less
>predictable your progress will be, and the crappier your end product.
>There are exceptions where *not* pushing a particular frontier will
>actually make your life harder because there is synergy between
>different traditional ways of doing things.

This is an important point. My instinct is to tear up everything and restart.
This is dangerous.
Supporting legacy code may be harmless but I have often fough
to avoid the following pit-fall:
Implementing some Unix environment and telling customers that
we can  run all of their old code.
The security problems of Unix are in parts of the Unix architecture
that legacy code may have been closely adapted to.
The result will probably be an insecure system that is slower than Unix.
(Slower due to Unix emulation)
At least some of the legacy application must be redone in order to
gain security advantages of Eros/Keykos.
Great gobs of legacy code may remain unaffected.
...

Norman Hardy  <http://www.mediacity.com/~norm>