[Discuss] The Register: Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

[Bill Bogstad]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2024 at 9:42 PM Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 20 Feb 2024 14:00:10 -0500
> Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:
>
> > P.S. Does X do things as files? I've only ever been a user,
>
> No. X11 is a display server and a network protocol stack. It is OS and
> architecture agnostic. X11 clients might do things as files, or they
> might not, but this is entirely separate from X11 itself.

But not necessarily from its implementations.  For local system
connections, UNIX domain sockets appear to still be used which show up
as
'socket' files in a filesystem.   On a Ubuntu 22.04 system, I appear
to be using WAYLAND and have an Xwayland process running to support X
clients.
If I look into the /tmp/.X11 directory I can see multiple socket files
which appear to correspond to the $DISPLAY variable that X clients
use to find their server.   So if you subscribe to the idea that
/dev/tty is an example of 'everything is a file', then

$ ls -l /tmp/.X11-unix/X0
srwxrwxr-x 1 bogstad bogstad 0 Feb 15 14:27 /tmp/.X11-unix/X0

is X11 using a file as a core part of its user visible operations.
As I understand it, this is a fundamental difference between X11 and
WAYLAND.
X11 is essentially agnostic and just needs a bidirectional
communications channel between the server and clients.

I would suggest that this is somewhat similar to a web browser not
caring if you are using http: or https:.   You could probably teach a
web
server to run the HTTP protocol on a UNIX domain socket, but no
browser could talk to it.  I think the 'file:' access method assumes
raw
documents (HTML, JPEG, etc.)  and would die if it saw the http protocol.

-- 
Bill Bogstad
bogstad at pobox.com