On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Olli Ries <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 9:06 AM, Michael Torrie <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 12/07/2013 07:30 AM, Olli Ries wrote: >> > On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 1:18 AM, Dan Egli <[email protected]> wrote: >> > >> >> On December 5, 2013, Michael Torrie wrote: >> > [...] > You missed the biggest and most controversial change: Mir. >> > > Mir does have nothing to do with Unity > > >> Unity isn't all bad by any means. I think part of the problem is >> Canonical's decisions to go their own way in terms of Desktop >> technologies (Mir, for example), instead of working with the community. > > > well, there is a lot to be said (and it was back in March when Mir came ou > [major use of non-ML-compliant curse words for my touchpad deleted] trying to restart... well, there is a lot to be said (and it was said back in March when Mir came out) unlike Wayland or other other projects out there, Mir does not try to be a general purpose system but is focusing on accomodating the requirements of the guys sponsoring it, without limiting others to adopt it though. I understand that one can argue that this is not the best way to drive open source adoption but, at the same time, who cares as long as customer #1 (Unity) is happy when there is no other "customer". Now there has been some unfortunate back and forth between Mark and e.g. the KDE community, arguing about whether KDE will adopt it or not. Mir as an OSS project would like to see wide adoption of other consumers and is supportive of that. However, Mir tries to avoid an large extension framework which will be X all over again (regarding incompatible extensions, that are version incompatible etc). The key argument why Mir exists today is simply that Wayland is only a protocol definition, iow you need an actual implementation of it. This is provided by Weston, which was referred to as testbed implementation earlier. Moving that ever growing code base to something that is "production ready" for an Ubuntu LTS release would have required a similar amount of work than doing it "right" (for your very own definition of "right") from scratch (think of TDD, CI, etc). Take all this and add a code base on top that tries to cater to everybody & his dog's Desktop Environment needs and you find yourself quickly asking as to why you would go through all that when it can be done with a narrowed focus in less time at higher velocity. Writing a display server (i.e. a system that provides buffers that are being rendered in, handles input and output) is not rocket science and seeing Mir shipped on Ubuntu Touch should prove it. Other projects have taken more time to get to a similar state and you would guess that most of the time was spend on catering to many consumers' needs. Mir is just another convenient addition to anti-Canonical arguments, I don't remember seeing such an outcry when Google did Surface flinger (or Android as a whole for that matter of not integrating well with the wider OSS ecosystem). In the (sometimes forgotten) OSS spirit of "each to his own" and general software freedom, Canonical does not force anyone outside the Ubuntu ecosystem to use Mir (where force is a strong word, the average Joe UbuntuUser does not care if X/Wayland/Mir or something else is putting pixels to his screen) and is stipulating Mir adoption simply by delivering a (display server) system that rocks. Those that can see past the FUD of CLA & not being a good OSS member & whatever else are giving Mir a rather objective review and these end up being mostly positive. my 0.02$ Olli /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
