Kristian Høgsberg blog post

[stalynx]

http://hoegsberg.blogspot.com/2007/02/pushing-envelope.html

Rather interesting comments from Kristian Høgsberg. Also right before xdevconf where Quinn Storm will be giving a Beryl presentation.

[FunkyM]

In general, David solves the root of the problem and gets the solution upstream, improving the platform for everybody, instead of papering over the problem with cheap hacks.

Best one.

[mikedee]

Also right before xdevconf where Quinn Storm will be giving a Beryl presentation.

Are you sure about that one? Quinn (or rather Thomas Morrow) will be at XDC but I doubt he will actually be giving a talk about anything. More like looking for a job or trying to cling onto anyone who might give him a job.

I think this has to be my favourite comment from the blog though.

Beryl is a steaming pile of bad code worked on by amateurs. None of the actually productive engineers "switched" to beryl like the guys did in Xfree86 vs Xorg. The guys working on Beryl are rejects, rejected people who never worked one line of real code inside Compiz, unlike Keith Packard and all the troopers of Xfree86 who initiated the Xorg project. Beryl guys are reject because their code didn't live up the Compiz coding standards.

Kristian has it spot on, all of the innovations in beryl are not pushing the envelope. We ALREADY KNEW that those things were possible. David et al are pushing WHAT WE CAN DO. Things that were impossible 6 months ago will be easy in the next 6 months, thanks to David not any of the beryl developers.

Compiz is already leaping ahead of beryl in terms of features, beryl is basically frozen at compiz version 0.1.x they admit themselves that they cannot keep up with Davids patches (even though they would like to). History will show which method is best. Once we have input redirection support in compiz and the server, I think we will break away because beryl do not have the manpower to keep up with Compiz AND do whatever the community wants to do (and fix all the bugs :D)

[RYX]

Nothing more to add :D ...

Pretending - that's all they can do ... pretending to be a girl, pretending to be a developer, pretending to be a leader, pretending to be innovative, pretending to become Ubuntu-default ... (this could go on for hundred lines).

:D

[iznogood]

hi everyone,

most of these are true, but there are some really talented people there as well that deserve credit for some things. We should not put all of them in the same basket. Some of them would do a better job here but its their decision to work - contribute where they like it most or feel more comfortable.
Its the behaviour of VERY few people who created this mess with compiz - beryl and they alone are the one's to blame for all, the others are just hackers who like to contribute - experiment.

Btw is anyone hacking on a new dockbar or an existing one like kxdocker ??

[baze]

take a look at www.gnome-dock.org

[iznogood]

take a look at www.gnome-dock.org

i know about gnome-dock but it sucks. Very very slow

Edit: just found http://code.google.com/p/avant-window-navigator/

[RYX]

I will implement drag&drop features for the screenlets soon, then it will be easy to create a fully themeable DockScreenlet ... (just another option)

:D

[mikedee]

most of these are true, but there are some really talented people there as well that deserve credit for some things. We should not put all of them in the same basket. Some of them would do a better job here but its their decision to work - contribute where they like it most or feel more comfortable.
Its the behaviour of VERY few people who created this mess with compiz - beryl and they alone are the one's to blame for all, the others are just hackers who like to contribute - experiment.

I agree, but those other hackers need to look at themselves and work out where their priorities lie. They could contribute their code to compiz instead of beryl, the differences are very small.

Instead they choose to believe the hype spread about beryl and choose to take the beryl side rather than the linux side (ie contributing for everyones benefit). They are trying to make beryl default rather than contributing back to the pot that they took from. To me it is totally pointless to have 2 slightly different cores and lots of wasted effort. They want to make it a competition, so they will need to face the fact that some people may not like what they are doing, and will point out when they lie and deceive people.

The innocent people will be tarred with the same brush as everyone else involved, sorry, but they have a choice and they think they can eliminate Compiz and any people who do not agree with them or point out the faults of the beryl project. They think they will emerge on the other side where beryl is the only composited window manager on linux and they are heros.

I think in the end those people are just being fools to themselves. I personally learned a long time ago that if you want to improve yourself you should associate and learn from people who are better/more experienced than you.

I think this post shows exactly how these people feel when they find out that actually they have been led down the wrong path. Sometimes just saying "yay, great code" can be more damaging than pointing out faults or places where it can be improved (particularly the latter).

http://lists.beryl-project.org/pipermail/beryl-dev/2007-January/000079.html

If in the future David has some spare time and the desire, I am sure he could write a really good window grouping plugin. The beryl group plugin will be forgotten and whoever wrote it will be forgotten. Look at what has already happened to the dbus plugin (anyone remember who wrote the first one? bit of compiz trivia for you ;)), aquamarine/kwd, blurfx/new fast blur. The people looking for fame should contribute it to compiz so that it will be long lasting and David will not just write it better.

Hey, its up to them though. Im just pointing out the obvious :)

Btw is anyone hacking on a new dockbar or an existing one like kxdocker ??

The thumbnail support will make this much easier, once its done properly ;). Taskbars with live thumbnails (including minimized windows) will be childs play soon so I am sure we will see lots of experimentation :)

[iznogood]

well, we agree i guess....

Hopefully they might change their mind later...

[gnumdk]

I discuss with beryl dev on irc... They said that there is no plan to sync again beryl with compiz code...

Kristian (beryl one) say me David do bad code ! So funny when you just give a look at beryl commit log and all bad code going into beryl...

[mikedee]

I discuss with beryl dev on irc... They said that there is no plan to sync again beryl with compiz code...

Hmmm...

We don't want to destabilize the codebase any more than it already is, but on the flipside, we don't want to be behind compiz in bugfixes at the very least.

Only one sentence but it says a lot...

http://lists.beryl-project.org/pipermail/beryl-dev/2007-January/000072.html

I am not sure if you should listen to Kristian, he is not part of the 'Beryl Council' according to this page, he is not even part of public relations.

http://www.beryl-project.org/team.php

It says that he is a 'Lead Developer' and that 'all commits to core must go through them or be performed with their direct approval' BUT (and this is a big but), on his blog he is raving about how they are going to replace the WRAP/UNWRAP mechanism with a linked list. Someone even went to the effort to write the code but it was deleted entirely by quinn marked as 'cruft'. Seems like all commits do not get his approval, otherwise he would not be talking about something that was removed weeks before he made the post.

http://bugs.beryl-project.org/changeset/3109 - dated 25 January
http://dev.beryl-project.org/~kristian/beryl/6/linuxforumdk-and-03x-work/ - dated 4 February

[stalynx]

Also right before xdevconf where Quinn Storm will be giving a Beryl presentation.

Are you sure about that one? Quinn (or rather Thomas Morrow) will be at XDC but I doubt he will actually be giving a talk about anything. More like looking for a job or trying to cling onto anyone who might give him a job.


Well according to this (http://wiki.x.org/wiki/Xorg_Developer%27s_Conference) she is giving one right after DavidR's presentation about Compiz.

[mikedee]

Also right before xdevconf where Quinn Storm will be giving a Beryl presentation.

Are you sure about that one? Quinn (or rather Thomas Morrow) will be at XDC but I doubt he will actually be giving a talk about anything. More like looking for a job or trying to cling onto anyone who might give him a job.


Well according to this (http://wiki.x.org/wiki/Xorg_Developer%27s_Conference) she is giving one right after DavidR's presentation about Compiz.

Wow - Last I heard, Quinn was banned by the beryl collective from speaking publically about Beryl, after the disastrous Ubuntu "Coloured overlays" interview and the tragic LUG interview, I would probably agree with them.

Just look at the people around Quinn, I doubt she will be talking for long or at all.

I hope there is a video available afterwards (she is supposed to be talking very soon now?).

[imnotpc]

It would be nice if they had a video of all the presentations. I hope someone is recording this.

[nzjrs]

For speaker notes of the XDC talks check out

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/XDC2007Notes

It is a very interesting read about the general future of X.

Regarding Compiz and Beryl, I will not comment directly on the following extract from that page but I think it speaks volumes about the two projects.

David Reveman: Compiz

What is compiz? Compositing window manager with flexible plugin architecture.

Latest additions include multihead support and pluggable fragment shading. (shiny demo of stacked fragment plugins)

Wants to switch to software cursors. Doing this properly requires modifying the Fixes extension's reporting of cursor changes to include the sprite dimensions and hotspot.

Also wants to change the Xv interface to allow the compositing manager to do the colorspace conversion and scaling, which would be slightly more efficient in terms of copies, gets frame sync (potentially) right, etc.

Drawing synchronization. Could be done entirely client-side, but could also have server-support. Most of the server support options are fairly brutal; needs more thought. Do client side first.

Input transformation. Need it so you can interact (correctly) with transformed windows. Match the triangle primitives of the windows to an input mesh, and do the straightforward pick. Implementation is started, where Composite clients provide pairs of triangles that specify the mapping lfrom the composite window to the redirected subwindow. Minimal DIX changes to XYToWindow, WriteEventsToClient, and TranslateCoords.

Retained drawing interface. Currently have interfaces for decorations, video, thumbnails, blur-behind-window, etc. Want one common interface instead, with tree hierarchy of inheritance, extensible by current plugin architecture.

Quinn Storm: Beryl

Beryl is another GL-based compositing manager. Started as a fork of compiz, has many more visual effects, bit more experimental of a plugin interface, etc.

(mostly demo)