On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 08:31:41PM +0400, h...@riseup.net wrote:
> These are optional dependencies, it can be compiled without them given you do
> this by hand.
> A minimal installation doesn't require any gtk libs, neither it does gettext,
> iconv or perl. Most of
> the bloat is hidden inside the xterm which includes support for ancient DEC
> terminals (do you
> have one? let's swap the emulator with it, 'cause it's a "real thing"!);
> direct dependence
> on the X toolkit, large codebase of about 75.000 lines of code that lasts
> since '84 - that's
> almost 30 years! The problem, of course, is not with age actually. Unix rolls
> its history since the
> 60s and there are no competitors even on the horizon. It's not about amount
> of code either - look
> at vim, for instance. The problem is that this code in those 30 years has
> transformed in a series
> of unclear hacks here and there. And like in happened with the GCC the
> resulted architecture simply
> slows the monster down year by year.
xterm supports two terminals, DEC VT100 and Tektronix 4014. A VT100 is
ancient, but I don't see a problem with that. There's no need to
redefine cursor positioning escape sequences every few years. I'm using
that right now to display this mail. The 4014 support is much more
uncommon, but I do actually use it occasionally[1].
The real issue is that people now expect X to come with xterm and that's
that. Removing xterm would be quite unfortunate, as it breaks people's
expectations of how the system works. Let's please not emulate certain
popular Linux distribution's habits of replacing or removing
functionality and subsystems.
A clean UI does not imply clean code (though I do realize xterm is
hairy, it at least has history on its side).
[1] Please see my wonderful screenshot of Tek mode in use:
https://www.martinbrandenburg.com/2013/ss/2013073101.png
- Martin Brandenburg
