non-Unity flavours and Mir

[Scott Kitterman]

On Monday, June 17, 2013 09:52:49 PM Oliver Ries wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Scott Kitterman 
<ubuntu at kitterman.com>wrote:
> > On Friday, June 14, 2013 11:09:25 AM Oliver Ries wrote:
> > 
> > [...]
> > 
> > > in addition to that I just want to highlight, that Jono and I are
> > > working
> > > on creating a forum for all interested Mir stakeholders (e.g. flavors,
> > 
> > but
> > 
> > > also ISVs and others) to discuss such issues and drive alignment.
> > > 
> > > We hope to have an update on that next week.
> > 
> > OK.
> > 
> > See this is part of the problem.  I don't WANT to be a Mir stakeholder.  I
> > want to focus my Kubuntu work on packaging KDE and making it work well.
> > Historically, one of the great things about Kubuntu has been that we could
> > rely on the work of the X team to give us a great display system with up
> > to
> > date hardware support that we didn't have to worry about.
> 
> with that I take that your concerns would be addressed if there was kwin
> support in Mir.
> 
> I think Ubuntu as an OS platform for KUbuntu is interested in working with
> you on that. The conflict that needs to be solved is between your upstream
> (kwin) and the OS platform. From what I understand from this thread is that
> the main concern there (leaving any ideological or political motivation
> aside) is having to support a single distribution solution, which
> admittedly is fair in a world of limited resources.

In addition to limited resources for development, it'd be something that 
upstream is completely unable to test.  

> My team is committed to not lock out any *buntu flavor but provide you with
> all means to still run on Ubuntu as an OS platform once Mir is an integral
> part of that (which is why I am referring to you as a stakeholder at least
> for the transition period).
> 
> As mentioned, we are planning to soon reach out to stakeholders and
> dependent parties to discuss a plan forward on this topic. We sure would
> appreciate your input in moving forward in a constructive discussion.

OK.

Part of the problem is that no one outside Canonical know enough to really 
have an informed opinion.  Here are some immediate questions that come to 
mind:

 - How invasive would Mir integration be?  Is it isolated enough that it could 
be integrated upstream based on our testing?

 - What's the time line?  When , if we follow along with Ubuntu, would we 
expect to run with XMir instead of X and when would we expect to integrate 
with MIR natively?

 - When will MIR have a stable API/ABI?

Scott K