The Beryl introduce yourself thread

[imnotpc]

I was doing a little forum surfing over at Beryl and came across this:

http://forum.beryl-project.org/viewtopic.php?t=5

I only read the first two pages and the last one (edit: I've now read them all, same conclusions) but they were truly fascinating and enlightening, at least for latecomers to the party like myself. I am *not* starting a flame war here but I think it might be useful for our newer members to get to know the neighborhood and compare the communities. I couple very subjective observations:

1. About half the posters were 16 or under. Obviously not a lot of experience now, but if they stay with the project in a few years they will come into their own.

2. Only about one in ten has any serious programming experience. Even though their community is 5-10x the size of compiz community, I think we may have more actual developers.

3. Edited by zootreeves

4. They have some real.... umm... some of their members are.... oh never mind.

[QuinnStorm]

Quick reply (and my first post here):

Yes we have some...er...strange people, e.g. Delfick.

We do have a core of...to guesstimate, perhaps 20 actual developers, with lots of others doing bug reports, suggestions, art, website work, etc.

As for me, yes, I am a transgendered person. I don't BS either. I'm mtf tg, "lesbian trapped in a man's body". As for why I don't BS...I'm Asperger's, and I also don't believe that BS is worth anything

[gandalfn]

I think that your intention was innocent but sorry I think that your post must be moderated or rectify, it can hurt persons involved.

gandalfn

[QuinnStorm]

If you are referring to my post, Delfick has actually requested that his forum title be "crazy guy", he'd be happy to be known as a bit weird.

[gandalfn]

If you are referring to my post, Delfick has actually requested that his forum title be "crazy guy", he'd be happy to be known as a bit weird.
No no i talked to imnotpc.

I can understand this post hurt you, I make a point of saying that I do not guarantee this type of matter. and for my part I present my excuses

gandalfn

EDIT: RYX please moderate first post

[QuinnStorm]

I'm not hurt. I just wanted to clear the air. It'd take more than that to really get under my skin

[Guest]

Moderated - no personal attacks imnotpc

and again welcome to the forum QuinnStorm

[DBO]

it might be worth mentioning that the introduce yourself thread was aimed at our more youthful members who often feel they dont have much to contribute to the project. Getting the youth involved in projects is not just essential for Beryl, but essential to open source as a whole. Someone has to pick the work when we are too old to deal with it, and guess who it is going to be... I am thrilled that we have so many young users interested in Beryl, full throttle 100% thrilled about that.

[imnotpc]

Whoa! Whoa! Chill. First of all, I'm glad QuinnStorm has joined the forum. Welcome. Second, Huh? I was making reference to her own description of herself on the Beryl forum (and whom she'd like to date, in far more detail than I used). Nothing more nothing less. Quinn, I apologize if you found my comments offensive.

In explanation, while searching through the forums I've seen reference to Quinn as both a man and a woman and seen a picture of a man. Her comment in the forum explained the discrepency. Many of the comments in the "Anything else interesting about you" field were clearly made up and I have no way of knowing if Quinn's comment wasn't also made up to play with people's heads, hence the BS comment. Again, no offense intended. Quinn, if you want to mail me off line (imnotpc-at-ubaight.com) I have an story of an individual I know similar to yourself that you may be interested in hearing (has a happy ending).

While your here, mind if I ask you: How do you envision the future of the relationship between compiz and beryl. For example, keeping a dialog open on compatibility issues and documentation?

Jeff

[imnotpc]

Getting the youth involved in projects is not just essential for Beryl, but essential to open source as a whole.

Welcome DBO. Indeed it is, hence my observation that they will be contributing more in the future. We at compiz need to look at your success at attracting members young and old and see if there are any lessons to be learned that can make us equally popular. This site has a pretty serious, business like atmosphere which is fine for coders but may be a bit dry for some younger enthusiasts.

Jeff

[QuinnStorm]

I'm not offended, and now in context your comment makes even more sense. As for the story, feel free to drop me mail, my livinglatexkali@gmail.com address is well known & thanks to google, well filtered.

[imnotpc]

Will do.

[mikedee]

First off - welcome to Quinn and other beryl devs

Second - the first flame fight to be moderated and I want involved ;)

Getting the youth involved in projects is not just essential for Beryl, but essential to open source as a whole.

Getting the youth involved is one thing, teaching them correctly is another.

I feel sorry for people like our friend corner who has been struggling for days to find out how to complete his snow plugin in time for christmas. He went to you guys, and you patched the core for him but the plugin is still slow. People like him should be pointed to the expert for guidance and any answer needs to be documented for others to see in the future (for easter when we have eggs falling down the desktop :)). Your solution was debated and implemented in IRC where nobody was there to correct any false assumptions or show a simple way to acheive the same thing.

The other occasion where people were taught incorrectly and beryl patched unnecessarilly was with the extra define for the window decoration mask. The same effect is possible without it and it isnt consistant with the other defines that it is grouped with, which makes it harder for the youth in the future to understand the code.

[RYX]

Welcome DBO and QuinnStorm (again). :D

I only wanted to note that I saw no reason for moderating the first post, it didn't appear really offensive to me - if QuinnStorm had felt offended I had intervented of course. But I want to remind that we shouldn't use the terms "them" and "us" too often ... we are all on the same side, no enemies. And please, mikedee, try to let the flames "burn" very low ... (you know I partly agree with what you say, but it can be expressed in a less provoking manner).

:)

[imnotpc]

Second - the first flame fight to be moderated and I want involved

And I was so sure you'd be the first... but I knew you'd be here eventually. :wink:

Oh well. You can use one end of the plunger to push it through, and the other end to stir it. It looks like I underestimated my ability to stir it.

[mikedee]

OK no problem... Ill keep the flames away, but I like to mention specifics.

Personally Quinns sexuality is the last thing I would like answers on. Hopefully she is now open to answering some more technical questions. I have a lot but I have always been ignored (hence the build up of flames).

Quinn?

[imnotpc]

Hey Quinn, I sent you a couple mails. They should be ok but you may want to check your spam folder if you haven't gotten them.

[QuinnStorm]

I found your mails in my spam folder, de-spam'd them.

As for the technical issues, I'd gladly speak to what I can of them. Please feel free to ask.

[imnotpc]

I'm not a dev so I can't speak directly on technical issues of compatibility and design. IMO I think that both projects benefit from compatability and it's in both our interests to maintain it to the greatest extent possible.

What I was thinking of was something like having an individual(s) in each project (a liaison of sorts) who monitors the discussions on the other site (mailing list, irc, forums, whatever..) and look for design changes that further break compatiblity. Perhaps have a forum section on each site where these issues can be discussed. Also they could look for posts that are inflamatory (ahem...) and address the issue directly before it gets blown up.

We haven't discussed this here yet so I don't know if the compiz people think this is necessary or a good idea. Just my thoughts...

[RYX]

I fully agree, imnotpc. I would like to see a more open discussion about these things. I found it sometimes hard to get informed about changes in beryl because most development-related things are discussed on IRC (which I can fully understand due to faster communication compared to a forum). Maybe we can discuss some basic guidelines for both projects to improve future compatibility (or at least portability) and communication. A special "communication-thread" could be a good start ...

:)

[mikedee]

I'm not a dev so I can't speak directly on technical issues of compatibility and design. IMO I think that both projects benefit from compatability and it's in both our interests to maintain it to the greatest extent possible.

I agree, the problem is that as you can see by my beryl plugin porting howto, most of the incompatabilities are very minor and easilly fixed. It appears to me that some of the incompatabilities were introduced in the early days just because the beryl devs wanted to be different (Quinn knows the ones I am talking about).

What I was thinking of was something like having an individual(s) in each project (a liaison of sorts) who monitors the discussions on the other site (mailing list, irc, forums, whatever..) and look for design changes that further break compatiblity. Perhaps have a forum section on each site where these issues can be discussed. Also they could look for posts that are inflamatory (ahem...) and address the issue directly before it gets blown up.

Thats me! I monitor the beryl svn for changes, I know all the breakages and the reasons for them. Beryl devs have never been interested in discussing breakages before they are implemented. They just ignore our concerns until they do blow up into a flame fight (fueled by the brainwashed users). None of the breakages have any technical merit and some of them are well known to have limitations.

Beryl devs do monitor compiz for changes and merge them into their tree, even though they claim in the roadmap that it is nearly impossible to apply patches from compiz. They do not care about changes which break plugins for compiz because they do not have to worry about them. Any changes which break compiz plugins for beryl are quickly merged.

The problem is we cannot (and do not want to) break plugin compatability on an almost daily basis without debating options, so any breakages are only one way, and I am the one that cleans up after the breakages and tries to smooth any legitimate changes back to compiz. This is why I probably have the strongest opinions on it (sadly I am branded as a troll).

[PaK]

Mikedee from your subjective point of view it seems that beryl developers now don't want to cooperate with compiz developers community, isn't that (but in reverse way) was main problem and reason why beryl project become fork of compiz ? This is ironic, isn't it ? :)

[mikedee]

Not as ironic as Quinn being a self confessed Asperger's sufferer, who critisized David for his lack of communication. We then rebelled against the rebels because they were not communicating with us.

If you then add the whole development behind closed doors thing, its enough to melt anyones brain.

I think the original reason for the fork is now clear, and unfortunatly to my keen eyes it seems like the fork was inevitable because Quinn did not send patches to David, so actually the lack of communication seemed to be coming from Quinn and not David.

In fact it was one thing that got me really angry. Just before the official announcement, there was a post on the mailing list about how people were not happy about their patches not being accepted and the general lack of communication. David responded in a very open and encouraging way and yet the fork still went ahead, it was a spit in the face of David and all the beryl devs knew it but they still kept the 'its a friendly fork line'.

There is a post on the mailing list where David made an email from Quinn public (I do not think he took this lightly). The email was from David asking to see the patches that they had done. Quinns response was basically - here is our source, you work out the changes yourself. I attempted to do this but quickly gave up because it was clear that the code had so many white space changes that merging any changes was very hard.

[PaK]

Well this is the dark side of Open Source :) we are only human beings right ? :) when our ego meet each other we become acting like that, i observe OS community from 1999 and i saw similar behaviors many many times. It is sad that people are trying to do something very idealistic and beautiful from the worst side :(

[stalynx]

Honestly I think we should all just move on and drop the the flame fest. It's obvious that the fork is not "amiable" and the beryl devs feel they owe nothing to upstream. So be it. I don't really care and I don't think DavidR cares that much either. This lame arguing about Beryl is just gaying up the forums.

The only Beryl discussion warranted is when trying to port plugins over. I think we should all agree to keep personal feelings aside and for the good of the community move on as a whole.

[QuinnStorm]

A few little clarifications.

#1 if our roadmap says that incorporating changes from compiz is hard, then it should be changd.

#2 we owe a lot to upstream, but not enough to change our license. If upstream were arranged in such a way as to accept GPL'd patches, then we'd be far more amiable to the idea of sending them.

#3 what breakage are you referring to? I am unaware of anything where we "ignored" complaints. Of course we've made our own decisions on some things (libbs, ipcs, etc.), but I doubt these are what you refer to as "breakage"

#4 when it comes to communication, yes, there is still some issue. Raising the issue of asperger's is merely a distraction. In my case, now that I'm properly medicated, all it means is I have a very low tolerance for nonsense. I am here because I do think we should have open communication.

#5 I am quite interested in an open discussion of the percieved slights beryl has "inflicted" upon the compiz community. It is obvious that there are a number of people who feel we have somehow hurt compiz, or somehow have something against you, which is not the truth at least as far as I have been able to discover. (and of course as leader of the project I do get to set the direction, so should there be someone in power in our project who does wish a less-than-amiable direction, I assure you they will get out of power rapidly. I refuse of course to name names)

[imnotpc]

I am quite interested in an open discussion of the percieved slights beryl has "inflicted" upon the compiz community.

Well, since you asked...

As you may have guessed I came here after the split so I only know bits and pieces of what went on at that time. But I am curious. When you (I use 'you' in the plural here) moved to beryl-project.org you put up a redirect page that pointed solely to beryl-project. If this was meant as an amicable split, why didn't you give the compiz people a chance to put up a site before you did that, or at the very least put the address of the compiz mailing list on that re-direct page? No mention of the fork. No sign that compiz still existed. Not only does this appear unfriendly, it appears to be intentionally misleading. More like a coup d'état than a friendly fork. Can you explain this to me?

[RYX]

I, personally, do not think that beryl "hurt" compiz. I was not really a fan of the fork, but I could live with it. My reason for switching to compiz had nothing to do with the beryl-developers, I like all of them (and also do not think they are bad programmers). Everyone can have his/her own feelings on this, but proving one party is wrong will be impossible (and childish) anyway - so please let's end all fork-related complaining and discussing. Once and forever!

We should not talk about the past, we should talk about the future - that's where we can do better ...

@Mikedee: (you know what I am gonna say now ;) ...) _please_ try to express your personal opinion about beryl-related things in a more diplomatic way.

(Could please someone briefly explain to me what is meant with that "Asperger"-thing? Sorry, my vocabulary is quite limited ... :))

:)

[mikedee]

Hey, you googled for me earlier ;)

http://www.aspergers.com/aspclin.htm

[RYX]

Thank you very much. ;)

(my guess was pretty close)

[QuinnStorm]

To answere the question about the website, the reasoning behind that was that the community that had grown up there was to be the same that would be behind beryl (remember, the website started from the group posting in the compiz-quinn thread on ubuntuforums). I admit that it was an oversight to not mention some more details about compiz there, but also remember, at that point there was no compiz site to redirect to. Now that there is, we should have a redirection there. It seems, as it stands, that we are getting NXDOMAIN for compiz.net, so I'm not sure what happened there. In truth, I think the compiz-quinn community should have adopted its own name far earlier on, making these sorts of issues far less likely to have happened. Either way, yes it was regrettable that the redirect page wasn't clearer, however, I shall restate, the community that had lived at compiz.net was a direct outgrowth of the compiz-quinn work, with few users of "vanilla compiz", and those "running" the community were part of the beryl fork, thus the decision. We should though have tried harder to find someone to run a compiz community for the redirect page to also link to, this I agree with.

[imnotpc]

OK, Thanks for the answer. Do you see now that this is one reason some compiz members feel the fork wasn't as friendly as you intended and why there are some people who are bitter? I'm sure there are other reasons too, but I think you see my point and I personally see no reason to discuss this further.

Compiz.net is still owned by iXce. After some discussion he agreed to point the domain to a re-direct page which had both sites listed on it, but I guess it's gone now. Maybe it was lost with the server crash.

Have you had any thoughts about my previous post on the idea of having liaisons monitor each other's sites? Maybe each of us having a section in our forum for discussions on compatiblity or community relation issues?

[mikedee]

BTW Quinn, my scripting plugin is not released under the GPL. You probably want to revert revisions 1598 and 1604. You probably also want to revert 1596 because those changes are by no means done yet. They have known bugs and will be changed a lot. They are strictly experimental.

Although, even in their state they seem to fly by your quality control. I think this is a serious problem with your project.

[mikedee]

Also, to prove I am such a nice guy and reasonable and all that, I did the work of removing the part about not being able to merge compiz changes for you, you will have to upload the new changes since I do not have access.

Beryl began as a community packaging of Compiz, in reality this is when the fork happened. Officially there was no fork announcement however for another couple months, when compiz-quinn was officially renamed Beryl to avoid confusing the end users.

For the record or for anyone who hasnt seen your roadmap, this is the reason given originally for the fork.

Beryl began as a community packaging of Compiz. However as the community package began to grow to adapt to the needs and desires of the community the diff with compiz and what was called compiz-quinn (named after the packager) began to grow relatively out of control. It was not long until the difference was so great that almost any change to compiz-fdo would not apply properly to compiz-quinn, in reality this is when the fork happened.

[QuinnStorm]

If your scripting plugin is under the LGPL, the MIT, the BSD, or any other similar license, it can be re-released under the GPL. (this is the same thing that happened with the compiz code when we forked and became beryl, and thus dropped the dual MIT/GPL for just GPL)

As for the bit about the reason for the fork, its true, changes don't apply cleanly without some work, but that doesn't mean that we can't incorporate changes, it just means that there is a large delta between the codebases.

[DBO]

A few little clarifications.

#1 if our roadmap says that incorporating changes from compiz is hard, then it should be changd.


Fixed. Simply an oversite in drafting that made it through to final. Now correctly states that compiz-quinn plugins could not directly work with compiz-fdo. Document does not, and will not get into why those changes were made, but I am working with another prominent member of the compiz community to produce a document explaining these differences. A bit of patience as this has not been fully polished yet, and as you can see, sometimes error checking is hard when documents have several authors.

Also mikedee, that is not intended as the reason for the fork, that document is not intended to state the reason at all. That is merely stating when the fork occured (code wise). The renaming process had a lot more details on that but many of those records have since been lose. Once again the document I am working on with MacSlow may shed some light. Unfortunately this has come to a slight standstill at the moment, I have little time and he has less.

If you like, I can discuss with members of the project on the subject of adding reasoning for the fork. But at this time the roadmap only contains information about when it occured and is intended to express a generally open arms philosophy with Compiz, despite our differences.

[mikedee]

So what exactly is the reason for the fork? It wasnt down to anything technical.

All we get from Quinn is the usual "doing what the community wants", "we want to do something a bit more different" etc. You have never explained what that really is, all the wishlist posts in your forum seem to be ignored.

How long are we expected to wait for this document? Maybe you could show us all what you have done so far?

Making it so that compiz plugins will load into beryl would be easy (and vice versa), but you do not seem interested in that goal even though a lot of people are interested in it.

[DBO]

All I can say is patience at this time... There are lots of touchy subjects that need to be discussed, and just barging into some issues and releasing half correct, half finished information on the matter is not going to help. It already caused one bit of confusion, lets not compound the situation. As to the bit of compatibility of plugins between the two, perhaps there is little interest because as you keep mentioning, porting them is easy? However making them 100% compatible might not be as easy as simply porting them, even a compatibility layer might be simpler. I don't know to be honest with you, but its a common topic.
As for the wishlist posts, unless you want to provide us with an army of atomic powered super coders, yeah most of them are going to go unanswered for a while. Though large amounts of them do get implemented. Transparent Cube, Input Zoom, Organic Scale, almost every single animation, the ability to disable the switcher part of switcher, and many more were first suggested in there. It is unfare to say they are all ignored, please try to stay reasonable...

[RYX]

There are lots of touchy subjects that need to be discussed, and just barging into some issues and releasing half correct, half finished information on the matter is not going to help. It already caused one bit of confusion, lets not compound the situation.
I absolutely agree with DBO here - everybody should keep the patience. That information is not _that_ essential for either of the communities and I don't want a single person's curiosity on this become the reason for more dispute and flaming between the two projects.

I think we all have more important things to do than discussing this old stories over and over again. Apart from proving yourself right (or the other site wrong) this fork-discussion has no benefit for anyone. If some of us can't resist to do that anyway, please try to reduce it to a minimum or discuss those things via PM (since I apparently cannot convince you to entirely leave it be).

A compatibility layer between compiz and beryl would be a great improvement for both projects and is a too important point to be discussed in this thread - it should be discussed in a separate thread entitled like e.g. "Compiz/Beryl compatibility".

:)

[mikedee]

Yeah rushing things to a half finished solution is never good, either for code or for documents explaining yourself.

Please could you lock this thread RYX, I cannot see it going any further.

I will end the thread with a quote from David, he deserves to have his opinion heard.


(Re : beryl fork)

I've seen that a lot of inaccurate and faulty information about this.

All technical reasons (alternative configuration system, alternative
decorator, xinerama...) for this fork are incorrect and I know that at
least Quinn Storm is aware of this, based on a phone conversation we had
last week.

I've designed compiz to be extremely extensible. The plugin system
should allow people to do almost anything and I've put high priority in
making sure that it got updated when I or someone else found something
that couldn't be done with it. People can choose whatever development
methods they want and put whatever code they want into plugins.

With a few notable exceptions, most of the code I've seen going into
what is now beryl is not high quality code that would be considered for
compiz.

I take seriously the feedback from the community that they would like to
see more open communication from me about the compiz roadmap and what
I'm working on. I'll do my best to improve this in the future, and I'm
always open to discussion about where compiz should go!

I'll continue to develop compiz and it looks like I'll be able to spend
more time on it from now on. I welcome contributions of new
functionality to compiz and if you have a plugin that you think should
be in the compiz repository I'll add it.

-David