non-Unity flavours and Mir

[Scott Kitterman]

On Monday, June 17, 2013 05:32:56 PM Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 05:13:33PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > I think Jonathon's post earlier today captures the core issue:
> > 
> > On Monday, June 17, 2013 09:05:08 PM Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> > > On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 08:01:16PM +0200, Thomas Voß wrote:
> > > > Yup :) I think a good way forward is to coordinate a call with
> > > > Jonathan and Martin from KWin such that we can walk through the code
> > > > together and identify the central points that would need to be mapped
> > > > to Mir. We can then start discussing potential solutions how to add
> > > > KWin support for Mir.
> > > 
> > > I'm afraid I don't have interest in such a call and neither do the
> > > KWin maintainers.  I don't know anything about the KWin codebase or
> > > how to begin porting it to another platform.  KWin are busy porting it
> > > to Wayland, the display server with consensus across Linux distros and
> > > have no interest in supporting a display server with unstable API/ABI
> > > that is only in one distro (from a company who have a track record of
> > > not maintaining their features, we're having to drop indicator menu
> > > support in Kubuntu because it's changed API).  Porting KWin to Mir
> > > would take several man-months at least and ongoing maintenance and I'm
> > > very skeptical Canonical would take that on.
> > 
> > As long as Canonical declines to work with the rest of the free software
> > community,
> 
> Well, I think that's an altogether inaccurate and unfair characterization.
> Canonical has always been open to working with "the rest of the free
> software community"; what Canonical has not been willing to do is blindly
> follow where certain self-appointed "upstreams" would lead, when that
> conflicts with the business's goals.  Wayland was evaluated, and found not
> to be suitable as a basis for Unity (as has been discussed elsewhere) -
> thus, Wayland is not an upstream of Canonical (nor, TTBOMK, of any other
> existing distros at the moment).  Canonical has made a decision to implement
> its own display server / compositor, in the form of Mir, and as expressed
> in this thread is open to working with developers from other desktops to
> see whether Mir can meet their needs as well.
> 
> The KWin maintainer wasted no time after Mir was announced to make it clear
> that he wanted no part of it.  I think that's unfortunate, but I also don't
> think that says anything about *Canonical's* willingness to work with others
> in the free software community.
> 
> > By deciding to do Mir, Canonical decided to go on it's own path that is
> > not the one that the rest of the community was on.  They're still on the
> > path they were on and while it may be reasonable for Canonical to do it's
> > own thing, I think Canonical has to also expect everyone else isn't going
> > to drop their plans and toe the Canonical line about the future of
> > $PROJECT (it could be any number of things, in this case it's what
> > replaces X).  AFAICT, both KDE and Gnome are satisfied with the path they
> > are on with Wayland, so Mir is not interesting for them (I know far less
> > about it for Gnome, but that's my understanding).
> 
> There's no expectation from Canonical's side that others will drop existing
> plans to "toe the Canonical line".  OTOH, as a bystander my understanding is
> that Wayland has yet to advance beyond the level of a pet project - not
> something production-ready that projects can rely on in a shipping release.
> So I think it would behoove projects like GNOME and KDE to give Mir a fair
> shake, rather than dismissing it because they've already hitched their cart
> to Wayland.
> 
> > I do think that the long term effect on flavors that aren't deeply
> > embedded in the Canonical technology set is reasonably clear and we
> > shouldn't try to hide it.
> 
> Certainly, flavors that are unable to align with technologies chosen for
> Ubuntu will find themselves with more work to do to keep up quality and be
> releasable.  I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that this means
> Kubuntu will be unreleasable because KWin will only support Wayland while
> Canonical will only support X and Mir in Ubuntu; but certainly someone would
> have to step up to provide *some* maintainable combination of components
> here (either Wayland in Ubuntu, or KWin with support for X or Mir backend,
> or...)
> 
> I'm personally optimistic that, given good will and an openness to
> collaboration on the part of the various upstreams, and leadership from the
> Kubuntu team about how the future display architecture should look for this
> flavor, you would find more than enough resources to help with the
> implementation.  But beyond the open hand the Mir developers have already
> offered here in this thread, this is really out of Canonical's control.

I agree.  This is more about consequences of decisions already taken.  I don't 
see a good solution.

Scott K