KDE Developers Continue To Be Frustrated With Canonical

[GreatEmerald]

I'm surprised Michael posted a link to Gr??lin's post that was a followup to his blog post, but not the actual link to the blog post in question (which elaborates more about what he finds abusive): http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blo...rce-tea-party/

Overall, I'm not sure if I can support Gr??lin's latest decision to oppose things from Canonical on political grounds from now on. While Canonical is doing very poor decisions lately, they hadn't done them before, and they might realise that their current policy is stupid and turn back to the rest of GNU/Linux in the future. Not very likely, but it could happen, so I wouldn't dismiss everything from Canonical out of hand ? just be sceptical about it and voice any valid concerns.

That said, I do think that his decision to quit Ubuntu-related communities is a good idea. That ought to result in better productivity overall.

[sonnet]

I don't like Unity, and in general I find Ubuntu got worse in the last 2 years (more bugs, less stability).
And I didn't like Ubuntu politics (I never understood why Ubuntu couldn't keep .deb compatibility with Debian, maybe there's a good technical reason, but I never understood it).

That being said, I wonder what's Martin's agenda in not-wanting support MIR.
Mir is a display server, developed by one company.
Saying it's just a specific distro-implementation is pure bs. It's a piece of software which can be implemented by other distros if they want to.
Obviously if he keeps refusing pataches to make it work it (like he said he'd do), distros using kde (most of the distros aout there) will unlikely not consider MIR as an option.
So saying "if other distros will use it..blah blah blah.." it's bs, because he's cutting out MIR before that step.
Like I said, I wonder what's the agenda of developers like him.
To him MIR or wayland shouldn't make a difference, or being biased towards one of the 2: he's developing KDE. Whether kde runs on top of xorg, mir or wayland
shouldn't make a difference to him. Normally a developer should be happier if his software can run on as many platforms as possible.
So if someone is willing to write a patch to make kde run Mir, he should just be happy someone did that job.
By refusing MIR like he did, he hurts not only the software platform he develops (kde) as also the users since he denies them a choice.
This is not OS philosophy: forcing users to choose between ubuntu (with its kde derivatives) and kde it's just a shameful political move.
And if I were him, rather than making the comment he made right after Mir was announced, I would have just waited and tried to know more about Mir.
That obviously unless someone has other motives behind.

The excuses he keeps making are just a pathetic nonsense, and it's one of the worst moves for the oss community.

[AnonymousCoward]

The posts people here keep making are just a pathetic nonsense, and it's one of the worst moves for the oss community.

[GreatEmerald]

That being said, I wonder what's Martin's agenda in not-wanting support MIR.
Mir is a display server, developed by one company.
Saying it's just a specific distro-implementation is pure bs. It's a piece of software which can be implemented by other distros if they want to.
Obviously if he keeps refusing pataches to make it work it (like he said he'd do), distros using kde (most of the distros aout there) will unlikely not consider MIR as an option.
So saying "if other distros will use it..blah blah blah.." it's bs, because he's cutting out MIR before that step.
Like I said, I wonder what's the agenda of developers like him.
To him MIR or wayland shouldn't make a difference, or being biased towards one of the 2: he's developing KDE. Whether kde runs on top of xorg, mir or wayland
shouldn't make a difference to him. Normally a developer should be happier if his software can run on as many platforms as possible.
So if someone is willing to write a patch to make kde run Mir, he should just be happy someone did that job.
By refusing MIR like he did, he hurts not only the software platform he develops (kde) as also the users since he denies them a choice.
This is not OS philosophy: forcing users to choose between ubuntu (with its kde derivatives) and kde it's just a shameful political move.
And if I were him, rather than making the comment he made right after Mir was announced, I would have just waited and tried to know more about Mir.
That obviously unless someone has other motives behind.

The excuses he keeps making are just a pathetic nonsense, and it's one of the worst moves for the oss community.

This post is the most perfect example I have seen so far to illustrate why Gr??lin is leaving Ubuntu communities. People attacking him personally, while having no idea about how development and maintenance work, what KDE policies are, what an investment it is to support several backends for a window manager, how unfriendly Mir is towards anything that isn't Unity and what Gr??lin is working on to begin with, among other things, while also spreading misinformation around.

[ua=42]

Is there somewhere a good reference/comparison to see what are the pros and cons of wayland and mir?

The main difference (that matters) between wayland and mir is this.
Wayland will have a stable, versioned interface for programs to hook into.
Mir has no stable interface, and programs will have to be rebuilt every-time Mir is rebuilt.

They also have different licenses. Wayland I believe is MIT while MIR is GPL3.

They are also different in that Mir has drawing functions built in while Wayland is just a buffer. Which have pros and cons. I personally think the arguments for having Wayland be a buffer makes sense (mainly, there will be much less maintenance going forward, and the drawing functions won't become obsolete like they did for xorg). But there are some reasoned arguments for having some functions in the server as well.

[k1l_]

Having Mir "in the archives" is some way short of actually being used. While it's not my decision to make, I'd say that to be considered, at least one other big-name distro should be using it as their default desktop platform, or be in the process of making it their default.

So you see where the Problem is? Even if the first Rule is fullfilled there will be other Rules to not take the patches. This doom-loop does not really satisfy.

The other big Point is: Not taking a patch because its one-distro-related is not a _technical_ one. Technically he could take the patch and put it in. Its a political Argument because he doesnt want to, because of expecting more work for maintainance or other reasons. But technically Kwin is capable of that patches.
we have already seen where this kind of patch-refusing ends with unity. its very hard to put unity into another distribution because gnome (upstream in that case) doesnt take the patches.

[Daktyl198]

I don't like Unity, and in general I find Ubuntu got worse in the last 2 years (more bugs, less stability).
And I didn't like Ubuntu politics (I never understood why Ubuntu couldn't keep .deb compatibility with Debian, maybe there's a good technical reason, but I never understood it).

That being said, I wonder what's Martin's agenda in not-wanting support MIR.
Mir is a display server, developed by one company.
Saying it's just a specific distro-implementation is pure bs. It's a piece of software which can be implemented by other distros if they want to.
Obviously if he keeps refusing pataches to make it work it (like he said he'd do), distros using kde (most of the distros aout there) will unlikely not consider MIR as an option.
So saying "if other distros will use it..blah blah blah.." it's bs, because he's cutting out MIR before that step.
Like I said, I wonder what's the agenda of developers like him.
To him MIR or wayland shouldn't make a difference, or being biased towards one of the 2: he's developing KDE. Whether kde runs on top of xorg, mir or wayland
shouldn't make a difference to him. Normally a developer should be happier if his software can run on as many platforms as possible.
So if someone is willing to write a patch to make kde run Mir, he should just be happy someone did that job.
By refusing MIR like he did, he hurts not only the software platform he develops (kde) as also the users since he denies them a choice.
This is not OS philosophy: forcing users to choose between ubuntu (with its kde derivatives) and kde it's just a shameful political move.
And if I were him, rather than making the comment he made right after Mir was announced, I would have just waited and tried to know more about Mir.
That obviously unless someone has other motives behind.

The excuses he keeps making are just a pathetic nonsense, and it's one of the worst moves for the oss community.

Have you ever actually developed something before?
If yes, has it ever been something as complex and low-level as KWin? No? Okay then SHUT UP.

Martin is waiting for another distro to stand up and say "We are going to use Mir as well" before adding support to KWin because the more back-ends you have to hook into, the more work goes into making sure crap doesn't break, the messier the code gets, etc, etc, etc
It takes a lot of work to add/support another display server to your window manager: it's taken Gnome over a year to get where they are with Wayland support (which is iffy atm) and that's with pooling most of their resources towards it. Now imagine us just going "Okay. Now do Mir, while you're trying to finish up Wayland support, BUT DON'T FORGET ABOUT X11 NOW!"... there's a reason the Gnome team just forked the entire code-base.
(That brings us to a whole other question of why nobody is fking ripping on Gnome for not adding Mir support)

Don't launch personal attacks at him for being "political" when his original actions were nothing of the sort.

P.S. I don't support Martin OR Canonical in this fight. I don't support fighting in the FOSS community at all. Forks happen, and that's okay. May the best project win.
I am personally "rooting" for Wayland, but that's because I believe in it technically over Mir (If Mir happens to be better, awesome. I'll use that.)

[nightmarex]

Yeah that's just bizarre. Having used zypper for some time now it is easily the best solver/package manager there is atm. I always feel like I'm downgrading when I go back to apt-based systems.

I don't think the linux ecosystem will ever change, as long as someone thinks they can do something better we will have alternatives cropping up.

I like su you probably use sudo, I like pacman for package management you like zypper and others like apt. I like the diversity. However there is nothing to stop someone from doing what steam did that takes care of packages cross distro. If such a platform were to prove effective it would unify the distros at least superficially.

[Andrecorreia]

well.

i love unity 7 and i hate kde 4.* my opinion my taste

if this guys don t like mir then why don t use wayland in future and stop with stupid non-sense?

[mrugiero]

Yeah that is an odd post. I still don't get the rage over Unity search searching the Internet. Nobody complains that Android search searches the internet, but the moment Unity does the same, they are worse than the NSA monitoring every phone call you ever make?! Oddly, the people most outraged by this are the ones who have already said they would never use Unity...

Oddly enough, I always see Ubuntu fans pointing fingers at Android anytime Canonical practices get criticized, although I constantly see Google being criticized by their lack of respect for privacy. Anyway, I do find exaggerated the comparison to the NSA.

He may regret using that reason for rejection, as it will be invalid the moment Mir gets packaged for Debian: "Obviously we will be working closely with Debian to help get Mir in the Debian archives too." - Jono Bacon

He will not regret. He will start analyzing the technical merits, as he said. Until then, he will not, because it is a single distro solution. Also, again, what's the reason for other DEs to support Mir? People on your side of the camp always say apps will be compatible anyway, because they will only use toolkits, so what difference does having KDE on Mir or Wayland make? What do they need it for? You use Unity? OK, use Unity with Mir. You use KDE? Well, you can use Wayland. Applications should run the same anyway.

Having Mir "in the archives" is some way short of actually being used. While it's not my decision to make, I'd say that to be considered, at least one other big-name distro should be using it as their default desktop platform, or be in the process of making it their default.

I don't agree. Having it in the archives is not enough to be considered used, but having it as default is too much a requirement. As long as there are bug reports from users on other distros, I'd consider it, since that's the point where downstream patches stop helping.

i love unity 7 and i hate kde 4.* my opinion my taste

if this guys don t like mir then why don t use wayland in future and stop with stupid non-sense?

The problem is not that they will just use Wayland, the problem is that people insists in him supporting Mir, too.
When anyone points out there doesn't seem any technical reasons to create Mir, people on that side says "it's free software, anyone should do whatever they want". Even while I agree only partially (because I see it could cause problems, but I still respect their freedom to do whatever they want), I expect those people to be consistent with that belief, and respect the lack of desire to support Mir from other developers. And saying "but why not accept patches" doesn't quite solve the problem, as accepting a patch implies accepting the maintenance burden, which is again something the dev might as well not want to do, and the dev is free to want or not want to maintain any given software.