It's time to jettison CCSM

[Mathieu Comandon]

Hi,

I strongly disagree on removing CCSM from the repos but more importantly I
want to make a point clear in this message. Deleting software from the
archive has never been the solution to fixing bugs and I can't see how it
will ever be. I am a heavy user of CCSM and while I agree that it's far
from perfect, it does the job pretty well and lets me fiddle with Compiz's
settings easily.
One thing I agree with is that CCSM does not play well with Unity and, yes,
it's very easy to mess your Unity install with it. But I'm not concerned by
that, I don't use Unity. The fact that I don't use Unity doesn't mean that
I would be willing to use any other WM than Compiz, I just can't imagine
using an inferior WM. Yes, there are bugs, some are annoying but i deal
with it.
>From my point of view, the fact that Compiz suffers from so much bugs is
that the project is slowly dying, just have a look at the forums, the IRC
channel, the git repo : it doesn't represent a healthy project. I can only
think of one person who does an incredible job at keeping Compiz alive, you
guessed it, it's smspillaz. A recent article on OMGUbuntu about that
subject clearly shows the bad posture Compiz is in.
Every major distro except Ubuntu now ships with Gnome-Shell which comes
bundled with mutter, which means that compiz suddenly has a whole lot less
users than before. And even Ubuntu, which strongly relies on Compiz, is not
fair with this project. The majority of bugs seen while playing with CCSM
are only related to Unity, without Unity things are still not perfect but
it's way harder to break one's desktop.
My opinion on this subject is that while I know that the Ubuntu Desktop
team focuses entirely on Unity, it should also play nice with vanilla
compiz because doing otherwise will only push compiz further down. What
would happen if compiz were to disappear ? Would a stripped down fork
appear, named unity-wm? I would personally see that as a huge regression
and we would all loose the most advanced and most configurable WM ever made.
Of course, the correct way to solve this issue is far more complicated than
just removing a package from the archive, it require solving bugs, bringing
new code in Unity while avoiding unwanted side effects on compiz and
basically requires more manpower. But solving the problem the good way
would surely help the project Unity heavily relies on, and it *really*
needs help.
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