Unity design vs. implementation: Nothing can go wrong!

[Samuel Thurston]

On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 10:32 PM, Paul Sladen <ubuntu at paul.sladen.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Apr 2011, Samuel Thurston wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 3:06 PM, chris <chevhq at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The problem is when you make "big shifts" on this kind of
>> timetable, without having prepped the work in the background.
>
> Where Ubuntu has been successful is interative development.  The Unity
> design is an interation of the design shipped in UNR/Ubuntu 10.10;
> what is unusual in this case is that the *implemenation* has been
> written from-scratch, twice.  There are now three Unity codebases:
>
>  1. Unity Clutter/Mutter (aka Ubuntu Netbook ... <= Ubuntu 10.10)
>  2. Unity Compiz (aka Unity 3D ... >= Ubuntu 11.04
>  3. Unity Qt (aka Unity 2D ... >= Ubuntu 11.04)
>
> Of the three codebases, two have been written from-scratch over the
> last release cycle.  So whilst the the Unity interface *design* is
> continuing to evolve the code implementations have not had that same
> benefit this time around.
>
> Software crashing is an implementation issue, rather than a design
> issue.   The work being done by Ayatana is continuing to evolve on an
> interative basis;  and for the next release cycle the Unity 2D/3D
> codebases will also be iterations of what has gone before.

I think my concern is that in my understanding Unity has never been a
"stable" package.  This seems like a reasonable precursor to making it
the centerpiece of the UI.  I am not quite following the point you're
making about the split code base, but it almost seems insane to me,
like for this release they decided to build a scratch reimplementation
of something that wasn't really finished in the first place?

>
>> When i heard the reasons fedora was dumping unity,
>
> I am not aware of Fedora having planned to ship Unity by default.  Do
> you have links/URLs to give better context?
>

It was months ago I remember hearing that this was a thing, and I
cannot find any references to it any more, so it is entirely possible
that I imagined it, or that it was such a premature discussion that it
never materialized beyond an obscure blog post or two.