taking Unity to the next level

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Mar 04, 2013 at 01:39:36PM -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Monday, March 04, 2013 05:46:54 PM Oliver Ries wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I wanted to give you a quick heads up regarding Unity in preparation of
> > this weeks UDS.
> > 
> > The traction that Ubuntu Touch is creating is great and the team is
> > happy with where this is leading us. However, in order to implement the
> > vision of converged devices, some changes to our Display Stack are
> > necessary.
> > 
> > After thorough research, looking at existing options and weighing in
> > costs & benefits we have decided to roll our own Display Server, Mir
> > (rf. http://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec).
> > 
> > None of the existing solutions would allow us to implement our vision
> > without taking major compromises which would come at the cost of user
> > experience and quality. We will be running sessions at UDS to discuss
> > questions and take feedback.
> > 
> > Also, driven by Ubuntu Touch we are starting to move Unity over to a
> > Qt/QML based implementation, embracing Qt as a community backed
> > technology for our offerings. We are looking at tackling the transition
> > from the Nux based implementation to a Qt/QML based implementation
> > component by component and are striving to do that in a transparent way
> > for the user. This topic is also up for discussion at UDS and we are
> > providing a spec at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityNextSpec.
> > 
> > I am providing more context about these topics at
> > http://www.olli-ries.com/mir-unity-qml-unity-apis-unity .
> > 
> > Please feel free to reach out to us during UDS and later on to discuss
> > any questions.
> 
> Does that mean that after next  April, the X stack and Wayland will no longer 
> be maintained by Canonical, so that flavors that are using a standard display 
> stack are on their own?

Wayland is not maintained by Canonical currently.  We do package it, as
it's required by mesa and some other projects, and that'll likely
continue as is.  Ideally we just sync it from Debian.

The X.org stack itself will probably be around for a good long while,
since legacy apps will need it for their rootless X sessions, and for
cases where Mir doesn't work right.  Our level of maintenance efforts
there will probably taper off over time in favor of Mir, though, maybe
to the point we're just syncing from Debian.  So yes for flavors staying
on X.org bases may need to be more involved in tending to their
foundation, but you'll likely always have the Debian base to build from
which I expect should be solid for as long as X11 remains relevant.

Bryce