Why Wayland & Weston Were Forked

[F i L]

Once you realize this, you can understand that:
"Minimizing" another surface simply means it's moved behind the desktop surface..

Not entirely. It's also a way to inform the application that it's no longer visible and doesn't need to render. Otherwise applications will go on happily rendering in the background when they don't need to, eating up performance.

I'm not fully aware of Wayland's protocols, so there may be some other standard the Server informs the client of this that doesn't have anything to do with "Minimizing" (aka "Don't Render Mode"), but it needs to be said that some standard way to express this should exist at the server level.

What would be cool, is if the compositor would automatically inform windows that are completely hidden by others that they don't need to be rendered (via our "Dont Render Mode" signal). Maybe that already happens, idk.

[nightmarex]

Kill it, Kill it with fire! Thank you, that is all.

[GreatEmerald]

Wrong. I said that I wanted to know how the wayland developers wanted me to program it correctly so it's suitable for upstream inclusion. You are sadly a mess of intentional confusion.

That was unwarranted. Once again, it doesn't help your case. Restrain yourself, and people will find it easier to cooperate with you.

And again, you should get back to the technical discussion. I haven't heard an answer about why exactly creating new extensions is something you can't do. In the article you mainly said that there was a lack of hooks which you could use to implement all the new effects you wish to see. Extensions should provide that, and they should be easier for you to maintain, too. So why not use them?

hahahahahahaahaha.

That was unwarranted either. How do you suppose you can change his mind, if you just drop remarks like that, without any actual merit? Do you think it makes it easier for him to listen to you, or that it makes your own image better?

[soreau]

New IRC Channel!

I would like to publically announce that there is a new channel on irc.freenode.net called #northfield. All interested are welcome to join.

One user is not welcome at this time unfortunately and that user is Darxus. He is not welcome because he takes chat logs and tries to use them against me and portray my person in a bad light by twisting my words.

I will be idling in this new channel and answering any questions or comments. Hope to see you all there, thanks for your continued support.

[GreatEmerald]

Well, that's also not really helping. Writing to non-realtime media is generally what you need, because it allows both sides to think a bit before submitting their replies. That does a good job preventing at least part of what you don't really mean to say from being said. Plus, a public log is useful, because it allows for opinions from third parties, and things can't be as easily taken out of context that way, as it's easy to see the context for everyone involved.

And again, don't single out people. If you don't like being quoted out of context, don't give people an opportunity to do so by behaving in a polite manner. If there's nothing to be ashamed of when you do get quoted that way, then you don't have to fear being quoted in the first place. Excluding people like that is not helping your relations.

All of you people are reasonable enough. You aren't trolls that just try to get everyone mad, you're better than that. You know fully well that misbehaviour on both ends is not going to help matters at all, it will just make the issue worse. You just need to have a level head and a clear, unbiased outlook, and you can work it out. Both parties would benefit a lot from the cooperation, and both parties are capable of it, if you just try.

[soreau]

Well, that's also not really helping. Writing to non-realtime media is generally what you need, because it allows both sides to think a bit before submitting their replies. That does a good job preventing at least part of what you don't really mean to say from being said. Plus, a public log is useful, because it allows for opinions from third parties, and things can't be as easily taken out of context that way, as it's easy to see the context for everyone involved.

And again, don't single out people. If you don't like being quoted out of context, don't give people an opportunity to do so by behaving in a polite manner. If there's nothing to be ashamed of when you do get quoted that way, then you don't have to fear being quoted in the first place. Excluding people like that is not helping your relations.

All of you people are reasonable enough. You aren't trolls that just try to get everyone mad, you're better than that. You know fully well that misbehaviour on both ends is not going to help matters at all, it will just make the issue worse. You just need to have a level head and a clear, unbiased outlook, and you can work it out. Both parties would benefit a lot from the cooperation, and both parties are capable of it, if you just try.

Freenode is useful and it is most certainly not something that should be discouraged. In fact, many of the greatest minds in Linux idle on the freenode network. It allows real people to communicate in real time, which some people find easier to use than traditional forum mediums we all use. This real time communication can incite emotions such as excitement and unfortunately, rage. Countless people have helped me through IRC. I have even helped someone diagnose and fix an automobile through IRC, that didn't know the first thing about automotive vehicles 'under the hood'. You can install an IRC lcient on any operating system, not just Linux. This is one of the many reasons I've been able to learn all I know today, and gain the knowledge that has brought me to the point I am at today. In fact, I have never been through any higher learning courses such as a university. I am 100% self taught, and I enjoy teaching others who want to learn, too. Thanks for your concern though.

[Darxus]

All of you people are reasonable enough. You aren't trolls that just try to get everyone mad, you're better than that. You know fully well that misbehaviour on both ends is not going to help matters at all, it will just make the issue worse. You just need to have a level head and a clear, unbiased outlook, and you can work it out. Both parties would benefit a lot from the cooperation, and both parties are capable of it, if you just try.

One side is trying. The other side....

--- Log opened Fri Mar 29 16:07:42 2013
16:07 <soreau> Hm, that didn't turn out very well for you, no did it?
16:07 <soreau> now* :-)
16:08 <Darxus> Happy about that, are you?
16:09 <soreau> I am quite proud, yes.
16:09 <soreau> see slashdot when you have time
16:09 * soreau has to get back to work on the site
16:09 <soreau> l8rz


Edit: In case it's not clear, his gloating is in reference to this article, and the slashdotting of it.

[airlied]

That was unwarranted. Once again, it doesn't help your case. Restrain yourself, and people will find it easier to cooperate with you.

And again, you should get back to the technical discussion. I haven't heard an answer about why exactly creating new extensions is something you can't do. In the article you mainly said that there was a lack of hooks which you could use to implement all the new effects you wish to see. Extensions should provide that, and they should be easier for you to maintain, too. So why not use them?



That was unwarranted either. How do you suppose you can change his mind, if you just drop remarks like that, without any actual merit? Do you think it makes it easier for him to listen to you, or that it makes your own image better?

because what he said made no sense. There is only one developer working on this at the moment, the fact that he hoovered up some patches from the wayland lists and then went and called those people Norwood developers just shows the guy isn't existing on the same level of reality as anyone else, and thus I have no interest in having him change his mind, because he's not possible to interact with. While acting all sane on here, he's pming us will bullshit on irc in private.

So really all I can do is laugh at him,

Dave.

[soreau]

One side is trying. The other side....

<IRC scrollback to be used in a negative light>

Edit: In case it's not clear, his gloating is in reference to this article, and the slashdotting of it.

This is exactly what I am talking about in the very first post in this thread.

[skaag]

Better things to do

I would like to maybe divert you guys to more positive directions, by first starting with an example of how things went wrong, and then proposing a new paradigm. Maybe instead of forking, you might want to work on an entirely new desktop paradigm, one that makes the desktop future-proof.

One of the reasons Macromedia Flash is so problematic is that it's a plugin. It does not have direct access to the browser's DOM, nor do scripts on the page have access to the internal DOM within the Flash object. They are two separate entities, running in two separate threads. Flash, being somewhat "dangerous" because of the kind of functions it exposes, is executed in a "sandbox" which is supposed to keep it from doing any damage to the system. If only Flash was an "engine" that offered accelerated rendering, and advanced animation functionality, and exposed those functions to the DOM, people could script using those advanced functions using JavaScript instead of ActionScript. Also, since all flash objects are actually within the browser's DOM, the Flash functions could work on ANY HTML Element, be they tables, div's, span's, etc. Imagine the possibilities, the richness. And I argue that the VIDEO element would probably not have been invented if Flash had just done this one simple thing, of exposing their functionality as functions inside the DOM instead of keeping them separate in their own proprietary container.

I see this as parallel to the way current Window managers function alongside X. Instead of introducing specific behavior into the core window manager, I would instead just expose raw functionality. In other words, Animation functionality, Effects, Shaders, etc. And I would then allow scripting it all. You could have packages that define the UI/UX language, that are written in either JavaScript or ChaiScript or really any scripting engine. As long as they have access to the "DOM" (In this case being Desktop Object Model), they can manipulate the objects on the desktop. One might produce a Metro UI clone, using a bunch of scripts that manipulate the DOM. Or really any other UI. It could be 3D, or 2D, or 4D! It could even be networked into some additional nodes on the cloud where some of your desktop element could live on. Once you have a DOM which can be serialized into JSON objects, the potential is infinite. Imagine how simple it is then, to share an application across networks? Yours looks the way you like, with your graphics and eye candy, but the substance, the "juice" of what you're viewing, is transferred to someone else's desktop, and there, his own UI Scripts apply their own animations and eye candy to the same application/content, and they see it the way they like.

I believe this is where Desktops will eventually go. There will be a DOM (Desktop Object Model), there will be "plugins" that introduce eye candy features, shaders, effects, maybe physical modeling effects, plugins that fetch data from the net and inject them into the DOM, etc. And there will be the underlying engine which just lets those plugins access the hardware via some HAL. This is the kind of desktop I would love to have in the future. A desktop where everything can be scripted. Where I can decide myself how windows are maximized, and where I can decide that if some window is maximized, I want to trigger certain specific actions, like lower the priority of all other applications, if the window I just maximized is a Media Player and I want to watch a movie without other apps bothering me or using the CPU too much (Just one example, I'm sure people will come up with amazing things once they have a DOM and plugins that allow scripting the DOM).

So yah, instead of wasting time arguing about an old and defunct desktop model, why don't you invent something awesome like this?