Ok, first let me explain why I've been absent for two weeks. First my PSU killed my computer, then I really struggled to find the motivation to pick this up. It's that hard to work with. But I have spent too much time and love working on Compiz and Beryl to let this die.
I saw the notes for the conference call, and it looks like it was mostly just a rush to get as much information out of a man that is incapable of using e-mail before he disappeared again. That's just too sad. The reality is that David has done tremendous amount of work for Compiz, no-one, not even I, can deny that. However, he has been one of the worst kind of project leaders we could've had. Since the merge, David has held control over Compiz and let it grow stale. Yes, there have been improvements, like Michael points out, but they have been mostly bugfixes, while the major design flaws have been left untouched. Nobody, myself included, wanted to work on Compiz (the core). I was working on it constantly in Beryl, so why didn't I continue to do that after the merge? I've been telling myself that it was because I was opposed to the merge, but that's not really true. The truth is that I didn't dare. I didn't know when David was going to announce or release the Next Big Thing, or how he wanted to move forward. Nobody did. So now that I cry out about this, someone drags David back into it. And Novell. I know that the intent was nothing but good, but it was wrong nevertheless. Compiz has had big community issues, and much of that is associated with David, and because of that, Novell. Compiz HAS to be a project that is run by the developers and the community, not by David, who has never been able to communicate and definitely not by Novell, regardless of how good the intentions are. We've already tried it that way, and the most important thing we can do, is make sure that we have control, and that it doesn't lay in the hands of someone who can't work the community. And nomad isn't really an issue yet. Even if we merge nomad now, and everything is perfect, we will still haven't developed as a community, instead, we're still being strangled. I suggest that if David, Novell or anyone else wants to get Nomad accepted, they do what Dennis did with Compiz++. Send a mail, detailing exactly what the piece of code does. Pros and Cons. Plans for merging, and how it would affect current and future development. I don't care that parts of it was explained in a conference call, that's not the way to work. We can't have a conference call every time we need to make a decision. Don't get me wrong, the only person who can do this, is the person who did the work. Dennis explaining Compiz++, David explaining Nomad. There's no other way, and you can't out source documentation either. And frankly, we can have as many conference calls as we want, it's not Mail as a medium that's "broken", it's the communication skills of the people involved. Yes, I'm looking at YOU AGAIN David. I will attend the conference call, because if I can't stop it, I might as well join it now that I know ahead of time (that I missed it last time was my fault, though). However, I still consider mail the only real way to communicate. We have people living in different time zones, and for most of us, it's hard enough to get time for Compiz as it is. I also want to note that time is relative. When a project is fun and rewarding to work with, people tend to find more time for it. Which makes it alarming how little time we find for Compiz. - Kristian _______________________________________________ compiz mailing list compiz@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/compiz
