[compiz] Re: Beryl Merger

[gandalfn]

Hello,

Let me please enter the debate about compiz-extra. It's me who named and
packaged the whole plugins beryl under compiz. I am not responsible of
plugins development, I only made an aggregate work of Mike Dransfield.
For me It was relevant  to offer a packaging and a simple installation
for the users. I took this name of compiz-extra because I thought that
the name compiz-community or some thing similar, was too polemical, at
the moment of its creation. 

My principal problem currently i don't know enough compiz development
and I miss some time. I was not able to maintain a version for last
GIT.

I think, that with the recent merge between Beryl/Compiz, the tarball
itself becomes rather problematic. The Community idea of the plugins, in
my opinion, would be to provide the plugins one by one, thus making
possible to the user to install a particular plugin, like themes or
desktop applets. This way it's also possible to maintain plugins
separately.

I currently work on gnome-compiz-manager to propose a gui interface of
binary plugins installation, one by one, like that apt or yum proposed.
The major problem i found currently is the plugins version management
which mainly depends on the ABI VERSION of compiz. Until a few days,
I'll propose some concrete things.

To finish, and from what I know from the compiz-extra maintenance, I
think that risk to maintain a compiz-extra tarball (or under its new
name), will bring more problem, than to propose the plugins one by one.
The problems that I saw occurring for compiz-extra, are: 
- plugins version synchronisation in each compiz-extra version
- management of the deprecated plugins 
- selection criteria of inclusion or exclusion of one or more plugins
- and the lack of time .....

Well, that was my 2 cents contribution.

Nicolas
-- 
gandalfn <gandalfn at club-internet.fr>