Intel and XMir

Posted Sep 11, 2013 16:18 UTC (Wed) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452)
In reply to: Intel and XMir by mjg59
Parent article: Intel and XMir

> right now the only software targeting Mir can't be built on Fedora anyway.

As the development if quite fast, the Ubuntu packages diverge from upstreams. I'm assuming things will settle a bit as development slows down and things stabilize. It happened with Compiz-based Unity.

Intel and XMir

Posted Sep 11, 2013 16:21 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (5 responses)

My understanding was that Unity-compiz still required code that Fedora doesn't ship. Is that out of date?

Intel and XMir

Posted Sep 11, 2013 16:27 UTC (Wed) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link] (4 responses)

Fedora didn't ship it mostly because noone volunteered to maintain the packages. It certainly didn't conflict with anything in Fedora.

In its early days it depended on features that were not yet in Fedora, such as XInput 2, but that's no longer the case. If I recall correctly their GTK plugin for global menus did not work with version of GTK in Fedora, but I can't remember why. There might have been more small inconveniences, but nothing major and overally the shell was fairly usable.

Intel and XMir

Posted Sep 11, 2013 17:29 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

It took a few *years* before Unity was in such a state. XMir is of low benefit to anyone (explained various times before, not going to repeat). This project just started and there were loads of problems getting even instructions on how to contribute (if outside of Ubuntu).

Unity is a good example why not to expect Mir to be running on any distribution any time soon.

Intel and XMir

Posted Sep 15, 2013 16:06 UTC (Sun) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

There was a semi-required gtk patch at one point that held up.

Its nice to see a packageset. So what's the plan for these packages now? Are you working on submitting them to maintain them in fedora proper? Compiz based unity is effectively on life support by upstream as Canonical makes the leap to unity next or whatever its formally called..which complicates things a bit for any external distro that wants to ship unity. I can't see the upstream codebase for this is official dead...but by all indication its grown a bit cold. I wonder if anyone over in debian-land is continuing the effort and get old-unity into debian.

Unfortunately the next unity requires mir, and mir is mired with significant upstream patchsets against xorg,mesa and graphics drivers. It's a bit of a rabbithole from a distro package maintainer standpoint..even with the compile from source instructions added to mir's dev pages.

-jef

Intel and XMir

Posted Sep 18, 2013 9:43 UTC (Wed) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't have any plans with Compiz & Unity. Though I find it really neat it is, as you said it, on life support. I didn't intend to push it to Fedora without at least one other person comaintain it either.

My motivation was that desktop that works well for me (which currently is el6 with GNOME 2) is not going to be around forever and I could not see a viable alternative in recent Fedora (situation may have changes with Mate) releases. On the other hand Ubuntu had a beautifully usable desktop.

> mir is mired with significant upstream patchsets against xorg,mesa and
> graphics drivers

Seems like they're actively trying to get their changes included in respective upstreams, which is a good thing. The challenges in doing that are well illustrated by this article.

Intel and XMir

Posted Sep 18, 2013 16:41 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Honestly, I don't necessarily think you need a comaintainer inside Fedora, you need a cross distro team to be able to maintain the non-packaging system specific bits in a shared workload sort of way.

You should try to have a chat with unpaid volunteers from any other Ubuntu distribution who has beat their head against this particular wall at some point... especially anyone from debian who is keen on using the compiz based unity in their distro of choice. There was an effort made in debian proper, it stalled out due to the early patching requirements.

Find those people and see if you can have a discussion about how to keep the code in a usable state across the distro boundaries with them and have the original Canonical devs in the room at least listening. I mean really, if you can spin up packages for Fedora without any mods to any other packages, then someone from debian proper should be able to re-engineer the packaging and get the equivalent up and running.

My offer still stands, I'll do the package reviews (when I'm actually on the grid and not at the arse end of the earth) for any serious Unity dep chain package submission into the fedora packaging process. But I'd really like to see a plan on how this codebase is going to be maintained via some upstream group now that Canonical looks to be moving on. Hence my suggestion to talk to other distros about their interest in keeping this alive.

-jef