X11 Library Sees Lots Of Fixes With libX11 1.7 Release

It's been seven years since the release of libX11 1.6.0 for this central X11 library while on Friday was replaced by the libX11 1.7 series. The release is primarily made up of fixes but leading to the version bump is a new API that allows for applications to recover from I/O error conditions rather than being forced to exit.

That API addition for libX11 1.7.0 is interesting with XSetIOErrorExitHandler. But besides that are many fixes that accumulated for quite a while. The fixes range from warning fixes to memory allocation bugs being addressed to thread safety issues being resolved. There are also new locales and other changes with libX11 1.7.0.

Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard has been fairly out of the X.Org scene recently besides his Valve contract work around VR, but he is the one that put together this libX11 1.7 update with the contributions of many. The list of changes for libX11 1.7 are outlined on the mailing list. Meanwhile still no signs of X.Org Server 1.21 moving closer but the back-ports continuing to the 1.20 series.