[compiz] Re: beryl fork

[Colin Guthrie]

David Reveman wrote:
> I've seen that a lot of inaccurate and faulty information about this.
>  
> All technical reasons (alternative configuration system, alternative
> decorator, xinerama...) for this fork are incorrect

I don't want to get drawn into a flame war here but I do need to comment
on this.

I remember asking many months ago when I first started experimenting
with compiz about Xinerama support. I was told that a current xinerama
implementation would not be commited to compiz as you had bigger plans
for multi-screen support. I accepted this, tho' was disappointed as it
meant I could not use compiz for daily use and I really wanted to.

I found the patch someone wrote to add Xinerama to Xgl and compiz and
was very happy as when compiz mostly worked with my dual head setup. I
knew it maybe wasn't the right way to do it, but all the same, it meant
I could play NOW!!! That's all I really wanted. It didn't matter to me
that it would be ripped out and replaced by something better later, this
was a quick fix that worked for me.

I know that you wanted the compiz.net community to effectivly turn into
the plugins community which is a great goal and I think mostly what it
will be under forked life anyway. But it stands to reason that some of
the new plugins will require some changes to the core, and for this
reason there has to be a fork so that these plugins can be rolled out
quickly to the community.

The co-existance of both beryl and compiz on any given system is also a
key part for the fork (e.g. no name conflicts).

I really hope both projects will continue to feed off each other, and I
think that your comments about the quality of code at least means you
are looking at what beryl has to offer in terms of new plugins etc. as
you've obviously been looking at the code.

I remember commenting to you the otherday about CSM plugin and you
replied saying you didn't know what it was. Well hopefully you'll be
doing what the people who are developing compiz are doing which is to
run the "other" version regularly and see what bits can be shared.

Even if you think some of the code is not up to standard (and you have
to remember that a lot of the code is written by enthusiastic people who
have not always have a strong programming background), then taking the
code that represents "good ideas" and improving it for compiz can only
be a good thing for both communities. Even if you do a complete rewrite,
in many cases it's the inspiration that counts :)

I support both projects equally, tho' it has to be said, that the people
and general buzz over in beryl land is a lot more inviting and open. I
just hope you can integrate yourself there David and feed of some of the
ideas and tallent that can be found there. I'm sure people on IRC at
#beryl-dev or #beryl would love to have you join in more.

Col.