[compiz] Beryl and Compiz Merge: What's actually going on?

[Robert Carr]

Compiz and Beryl merge: What's really going on?

Recently Quinns post to the beryl-dev mailing list entitled 'Merge on'
has led to a lot of discussion, some of which has been good and some
of which has led to a lot of misinformation, to clear things up I'd
like to give the story of the merge, and the justification for some of
the more peculiar aspects. Basically lets try to avoid misinformation
and make sure everyone has a realistic picture of what's happening.

The first thing I want to note is: The merge is NOT ON, it looks
incredibly likely, and it's looked incredibly likely for a few weeks
now, but there are still some very important things to work out, and a
lot of discussion still needs to happen.

Around a month and a half ago some of us were discussing some rather
radical changes to the design of beryl-core which we inherited from
Compiz, this inevitably led to "We should talk to Compiz about this to
keep things synced", which even more inevitably leads to "If we are
going to talk to Compiz to keep our designs similar, so on, so forth,
are our differences really so large that we need to be two seperate
projects?". After talking to a few people I sent an email to David
Reveman of Compiz on a personal basis suggesting the idea as something
worth discussing, and not really sure what to expect as a response
(not having interacted with David before). The response was better
than I could have hoped for, and David seemed very interesting in
working with us. Excited, a few of us organized a quick adhoc-meeting
and worked out a few things that we'd feel neccesary for a merge to
work, and a few of these have raised some rather controversy ridden
discussion now that they are well known, so I'd like to enumerate some
and justify them here.

Beryl has about 3 times as much code as Compiz, we've written this
because we feel it's neccesary or improves things in some way and we
want to see things integrated rather than go to waste. This one is
trivial really, it's obvious why we would like this, and we set up a
list of differences, discussed it a bit with Compiz people, and we're
able to quickly come to answers on most of the differences. This
was eased by Compiz's announcement that they plan to make
compiz-extras more of an official project, which has much of the same
structure
as Beryl, this made it evident that a lot of our goals really were the same.

New project under a new name, this has been the most controversial
point as a lot of people don't feel it's fair or that it will lead to
a lot of unneccesary difficulty, that it will lead to distributions
unwilling to support such a new window manager or dozens of other
complaints. I've thought about this quite a bit, and I'm going to try
and justify here why we initially asked for this, and likely why
Compiz is good with it. The primary reason is the difference in
structure between the two projects, Beryl and Compiz handle management
differently, handle new contributors differently, handle releases
differently, handle a LOT of things differently. Frankly I feel if we
merged under one of the previous projects (Call it X), then there
would be a tendancy to just give everyone from the other project (Call
it Y) a developer account, start merging the code from Y and say
"Merge done!". This will NOT work, all of us feel pretty strongly that
for the new project to succeeed it needs to include the best aspects
of both Beryl and Compiz, and under the envelope of the already
established Project X it's difficult and possibly impossible to
integrate the 'core' (not as in beryl-core as in metaphorical core),
of Y
properly. It's better to start from a blank organizational state and
decide everything together, we HAVE to decide things together,
frankly the worst imaginable situation is a month from now Project Y
says "This isn't what I expected from a merge! REFORK!". Another
crucial point is the communities, open source projects are built
around communities, and no community wants to be absorbed en masse in
to
another, theres a lot of bitterness between the Compiz and Beryl
communities and theres no better way to resolve this than the two work
together to make a new and better community. We'd also all like to
avoid the new project being stuck with whatever conceptions formed
around the name of the aforenamed project X, the new project will be a
merger of the Compiz and Beryl code yes, but it will be something
new, better, and with a broader scope, and we hope it can be looked at
that way.

Some sort of well defined leadership structure, probably decided
through some sort of vote. Again, the reasons for this are obvious.
And
no just "Having David and Quinn share leadership" is most definitely
definitely definitely not a viable option.

So, anyway back to the story. After this David and I (more on behalf
of Beryl at this point) exchanged quite a few emails back, having some
basic discussion as to how the technical differences can be resolved,
and then the discussion kind of died for a bit, though David did set
maniac onestone and I up with Compiz accounts. At this point we mostly
just went back to doing what we were doing even though it seemed like
everyone (except Quinn) was behind the merge. This kind of exposed a
big problem Beryl had, we had no way to make a decision outside of
consensus (not forming an official decision for the project), besides
a ruling from Quinn; rather ironic considering some of the reasons for
the fork, and frankly Quinn just wasn't willing to budge or really
discuss it in a reasonable fashion, so things were kind of dead. After
a while onestone started working on a new libberylsettings in tandem
with David (and drew a few others in to working on it), so that we
could reunite the Compiz and Beryl settings systems (the biggest
differences), and this kind of brought some interest back to the
merge. None of us were really sure how to make it happen due to the
aforementioned inability to make a decision, so eventually 4 of us
(onestone, maniac, iXce, and I) (at the risk of being colloquial) said
"Screw it" and contacted Compiz leadership essentially saying "We
can't get Quinn on board, but everyone else is, so why don't we just
go ahead and set up the new merged project, and announce that is where
we will be working in the future, everyone else will follow (as
EVERYONE was for it with the aforementioned exception), and it's
clearly the best thing for both projects." A few hours later Quinn
changed her mind, made the post mentioned at the start (Thanks Quinn
for taking another look at things and being willing to change your
mind, this makes things a lot easier, and is never easy).

So, that's where we stand now, some of the final details are being
discussed now and once David gets back from brainshare we hope to be
able to work out the remaining problems and have some more news within
a week or so!