[compiz] "Which version should I use?"

[Sam Spilsbury]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 7:41 PM, Kristian Lyngstøl
<kristian at bohemians.org> wrote:
>> Otherwise, if I were to give an objective assessment of 0.9, I'd say
>> that with the right skill set moving the older plugins over to using
>> modern OpenGL is not particularly hard. Probably one of the hardest
>> was the blur plugin and that only took me a day or two[3]. The three
>> biggest changes to rendering were
>>  1. The move to triangle-based meshes as opposed to relying on quads.
>>  2. The move from assembly fragment programs to GLSL.
>
>
> What does this actually offer the user, though? I understand what it does
> for platforms that only has one or the other set of functions of course, but
> does it actually make a difference for regular old computers where things
> have just always worked?

There's very little difference for end users.

The point of these changes, at least, was actually both for wayland
enablement and also ARM enablement. Of course, the days where this was
a priority are now past us.

>
>>  3. The move to using SwapBuffers (with GLX_EXT_buffer_age) as opposed
>> to CopySubBuffer.
>>
>>
>>
>> 1 & 2 are API-incompatible changes. 3 is a change that silently
>> exposes bugs in existing plugins, usually relating to a failure to
>> indicate update regions on the screen.
>
>
> There's a lot of wtf in old plugins, and core for that matter...
>
> As for 3, that makes a lot of general sense.
>
>>
>> In terms of Wayland, I'd honestly recommend look into using something
>> like libweston and putting a "compiz plugins" compatibility layer on
>> top of it. That all depends on what compiz plugins actually rely on
>> from core, but for about 90% of them, not much. Having a GLES
>> compatible codebase also helps there too, if that's a road one feels
>> like going down.
>
>
> I don't think moving compiz over to wayland is worth it, to be blunt. The
> code base (whatever version) is not a shining example of quality. I'd much
> rather see the things we miss in the world of Wayland be implemented
> properly than try to make Compiz move over.

Indeed, I came to a similar conclusion about this in late 2012. Its
why I moved on to other things.

- Sam.

>
> - Kristian



-- 
Sam Spilsbury