X11 was started in 1984 in MIT. That means, when Wayland was first conceived in 2008, there had been 24 years of X development.
I guess Kristian grossly underestimated the effort required to write a full features Display manager.
FWIW, innmy career the times I've had to perform very impactful changes in software, I always start from the current codebase and remove/simplify stuff.
As an example, once I was in a company that had built a huge Ruby monolith which was not scaling at all. It had APIs for everything, including "high frequency trading" in the same codebase server, under a METAL aws instance (that's how they scaled).
What we did initially was simply copy the repo N times (sign up, compliance, risk, trading, etc), spin up an copies of the same server and use a balancer to route APIs to the different boxes.
Then we started removing unused stuff from each of the repository to specialize them. Fiinally we simplified complexity on each separate codebase.
X11 was started in 1984 in MIT. That means, when Wayland was first conceived in 2008, there had been 24 years of X development.
I guess Kristian grossly underestimated the effort required to write a full features Display manager.
FWIW, innmy career the times I've had to perform very impactful changes in software, I always start from the current codebase and remove/simplify stuff.
As an example, once I was in a company that had built a huge Ruby monolith which was not scaling at all. It had APIs for everything, including "high frequency trading" in the same codebase server, under a METAL aws instance (that's how they scaled).
What we did initially was simply copy the repo N times (sign up, compliance, risk, trading, etc), spin up an copies of the same server and use a balancer to route APIs to the different boxes.
Then we started removing unused stuff from each of the repository to specialize them. Fiinally we simplified complexity on each separate codebase.
I would have approached X11 codebase similarly.