Hi Matthias, On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Matthias Klumpp <[email protected]>wrote:
> 2013/6/18 Jono Bacon <[email protected]>: > > I see this as a trade-off. > Fair point. But you can not expect KDE or GNOME to suddenly jump on > the Mir train. Supporting a new display server is pretty damn hard, it > took a lot of time to > clean up all the code to abstract X dependencies and make the switch > to a non-X displayserver possible. But after that is done, maintaining > a new display server backend is still not easy. And KDE and GNOME have > already put lots of work into Wayland porting, so why should everyone > now switch to Mir, a newly created project without stable API/ABI and > no obvious benefits except for Ubuntu support? > So, investing time into writing code for Mir makes no sense at all > from this point of view. There is still the option that Canonical > contributes code for Mir to e.g. KWin. Adding Mir support to KWin in > addition to Wayland would still be tricky, and doing it right be a lot > of work. Also, it would make code maintenance more complicated, so it > is understandable that upstream would reject the patches (similar > policy is applied for systemd to keep the codebase clean), as well as > I don't see Canonical writing patches for KWin/KDE - it just doesn't > make sense for the company to invest money into something which isn't > their primary product. > So I am afraid that this situation cannot be easily solved, and that > "you don't contribute to my project" accusations from any side will > not help solving it too. > > I completely understand Jonathan and Scott's perspective - if Wayland has already been decided as the primary display server for those projects and work has already been invested, I entirely understand why there would be less interest in Mir. I also appreciate that maintaining a Mir backend is a lot of work. My primary point was in response to "Canonical declines to work with the rest of the free software community"; I think this is an example of us being very eager and open to engage with upstream. I think we are doing the best we can, but entirely understand if upstream are uninterested in investing their time in Mir. > > Jonathan raised a valid point about KDE's needs and made it clear that > the > > Kubuntu team would prefer not to have to maintain Wayland as a > foundational > > piece in order to deliver Kubuntu. Obviously this work can be performed > by > > the Kubuntu team (or anyone else) if they wish to do so; the archive > > welcomes components that don't serve Canonical's needs. > > > > Canonical will of course be maintaining Mir as a core piece of > > infrastructure in the archive, and arguably encouraging Mir support in > > upstream KDE will help to alleviate this issue, but given that the Mir > team > > are very open to supporting this outcome but both yourself and Jonathan > are > > resistant to this, I am not sure what other options there are. > It is not about people being resistant. It is simple technical reasons > which make it difficult to resolve this situation. > In future, GNOME and KDE will share Wayland as display server, and > Ubuntu/Unity will have Mir, effectively breaking the infrastructure > unity we had between desktops apart. > From the current Mir specs, I also fear that replacing mir will be > easily possible (it is started at early boot and many things are > planned to connect to it as soon as possible - and Canonical would > have to think about a non-Mir situation when designing that > infrastructure - not sure if that will be done) But that's a different > topic. > > I understand the perspective that Mir can be seen as fragmenting the eco-system, but people make the same arguments at KDE and GNOME (and of course Unity), which are also infrastructure pieces. Sometimes a little choice can be a good thing; I am sure that Mir has already triggered some even more fervent Wayland development. :-) Jono -- Jono Bacon Ubuntu Community Manager www.ubuntu.com / www.jonobacon.org www.identi.ca/jonobacon www.twitter.com/jonobacon
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