KDE Developers Continue To Be Frustrated With Canonical

[jayrulez]

Note: if Canonical would not have lobbied us to implement Mir support I would not have written anything except my very first post on that topic where I stated that it's not of any interest to us. Anyway I would not agree on that I was slinging mud, at least not on the same level. I never spread lies about Mir (c.f. Wayland) and I did not personally attack/insult anybody from Canonical. Most of my blog posts or comments were in reply to something else like Mark stating that "KWin will work just fine on Mir". And I admit that I was very angry when I wrote the blog post in reply to that statement. The tea-party comment was nothing in comparison to that.

You are taking far too much from the "tea party" comment. It may be in bad taste but it not as bad as you make it out to be. I have read the post by Mark and that part seems to have been said it jest. It even had the smiley (/:-)) to denote that. I did not see it as an insult.

You have said that what you have written is not an effort to attack Canonical... language barrier... culture... and yadda yadda. You expect people reading you to give the benefit of the doubt. Ok, fair enough. However, you should also be able to give Mark the benefit of the doubt (that is with the tea party comment) that he intended to attack you. Your interpretation may be from the very same language barrier and cultural differences. It could very well be that in Mark's culture or among the people that he associates, comparing a group of people to the tea party is not much of an insult or an insult of all. If you are going to go that far [your reaction], then you could have done due diligence and try to find out what others outside of your circle thought of the "tea party".

It is possible that Mark may have meant it as an insult but it certainly not as bad as you and some others make it seem. [overreaction]

[Temar]

Note: if Canonical would not have lobbied us to implement Mir support I would not have written anything except my very first post on that topic where I stated that it's not of any interest to us. Anyway I would not agree on that I was slinging mud, at least not on the same level. I never spread lies about Mir (c.f. Wayland) and I did not personally attack/insult anybody from Canonical. Most of my blog posts or comments were in reply to something else like Mark stating that "KWin will work just fine on Mir". And I admit that I was very angry when I wrote the blog post in reply to that statement. The tea-party comment was nothing in comparison to that.

You should quit writing blog posts :-) Your first post was the one that got you into all this mess. Even though it was technical in nature it sounded more like politics. Why talk about not accepting patches for upstream projects or even vetoing against them? With such posts you are immediately closing a door, even though there is no need for it. You should simply have written: "We currently do not have the manpower to support multiple display servers. We are concentrating on Wayland for now as it will be the display server used by most distributions."

As you said yourself, it is not that easy to support KWin on Mir. So just wait and see what happens. Maybe someone comes up with a patch, maybe not. Cross that bridge about accepting/rejecting or vetoing against patches when it comes to it. You would be in much better position now and then.

[jayrulez]

You should quit writing blog posts :-) Your first post was the one that got you into all this mess. Even though it was technical in nature it sounded more like politics. Why talk about not accepting patches for upstream projects or even vetoing against them? With such posts you are immediately closing a door, even though there is no need for it. You should simply have written: "We currently do not have the manpower to support multiple display servers. We are concentrating on Wayland for now as it will be the display server used by most distributions."

As you said yourself, it is not that easy to support KWin on Mir. So just wait and see what happens. Maybe someone comes up with a patch, maybe not. Cross that bridge about accepting/rejecting or vetoing against patches when it comes to it. You would be in much better position now and then.

Enlightenment developers were able to do something similar without rustling any feathers and everyone just moved on.

[fossy]

You are taking far too much from the "tea party" comment. It may be in bad taste but it not as bad as you make it out to be. I have read the post by Mark and that part seems to have been said it jest. It even had the smiley (/:-)) to denote that. I did not see it as an insult.

You have said that what you have written is not an effort to attack Canonical... language barrier... culture... and yadda yadda. You expect people reading you to give the benefit of the doubt. Ok, fair enough. However, you should also be able to give Mark the benefit of the doubt (that is with the tea party comment) that he intended to attack you. Your interpretation may be from the very same language barrier and cultural differences. It could very well be that in Mark's culture or among the people that he associates, comparing a group of people to the tea party is not much of an insult or an insult of all. If you are going to go that far [your reaction], then you could have done due diligence and try to find out what others outside of your circle thought of the "tea party".

It is possible that Mark may have meant it as an insult but it certainly not as bad as you and some others make it seem. [overreaction]

I'm an englishman - so from my angle, the tea-party remark was referring to those that go about things with blinkers on - never deviating but believing they know the truth and everyone else who doesnt agree with your point-of-view is wrong.

As a developer myself, its exactly the view I have when I'm deeply involved in something for a long time. Sometimes its wiser to popup for fresh air - open the window and go for a walk.

Its part-and-parcel of the english mentality - cynicism and smiling combined in one. To other cultures I imagine this comes across as cross/angry and insensitive. To us, its water over a ducks back. Dont take it to heart. It isnt a threat and should never be inferred as one.

... and yes, I know Mark is a south african - but you quickly assimulate the traits of your adopted country.

And I end with the obligatory smiley ...

[JanC]

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.

AFAIK, only some libraries will have to be rebuilt, and no (or almost no) applications. Unless they want to use new features, of course.

Canonical would be crazy if they had to recompile half of the packages in their repositories every time they uploaded a new version of Mir (it's something that would take ages to complete, especially for ARM).

[jayrulez]

I'm an englishman - so from my angle, the tea-party remark was referring to those that go about things with blinkers on - never deviating but believing they know the truth and everyone else who doesnt agree with your point-of-view is wrong.

As a developer myself, its exactly the view I have when I'm deeply involved in something for a long time. Sometimes its wiser to popup for fresh air - open the window and go for a walk.

Its part-and-parcel of the english mentality - cynicism and smiling combined in one. To other cultures I imagine this comes across as cross/angry and insensitive. To us, its water over a ducks back. Dont take it to heart. It isnt a threat and should never be inferred as one.

... and yes, I know Mark is a south african - but you quickly assimulate the traits of your adopted country.

And I end with the obligatory smiley ...

Ha! I couldn't agree more.

[deanjo]

Yum existed long before Zypper. I don't think SUSE developed it based on egos and attitudes. They made a technical choice to start a competing project. Also, DNF is just a experimental fork of Yum to adopt libsolv. When it is tested enough, it will become the new yum and cease to exist as a separate project. A common dependency resolver library used by both Fedora and openSUSE is a good thing to have. You should be cheering it instead.

I know YUM existed well before zypper and it shows its age. That still doesn't mean that you have to reinvent it when there is a perfectly suitable alternative that is mature and and already has everything that YUM lacks. It's an attempt to solve a problem that has already been addressed and fixed elsewhere but NIH syndrome kicks in.

[RahulSundaram]

I know YUM existed well before zypper and it shows its age. That still doesn't mean that you have to reinvent it when there is a perfectly suitable alternative that is mature and and already has everything that YUM lacks. It's an attempt to solve a problem that has already been addressed and fixed elsewhere but NIH syndrome kicks in.

That NIH term has now been bandied about too much and has no real meaning anymore apparently. End result of this work is that yum and zypper will use a common dependency resolver. This is very much the opposite of NIH. yum is not just a command line utility. Yum API is by used by a enormous number of projects including the build system, installer etc in Fedora and you can't just swap it out. Yum is adopting the dependency resolver library aka libsolv which is the key piece of zypper project. When libsolv gets used by yum, end users can use zypper or yum and they would work exactly the same internally. This is really a big win win situation for both projects.

[marciocr]

Note: if Canonical would not have lobbied us to implement Mir support I would not have written anything except my very first post on that topic where I stated that it's not of any interest to us. Anyway I would not agree on that I was slinging mud, at least not on the same level. I never spread lies about Mir (c.f. Wayland) and I did not personally attack/insult anybody from Canonical. Most of my blog posts or comments were in reply to something else like Mark stating that "KWin will work just fine on Mir". And I admit that I was very angry when I wrote the blog post in reply to that statement. The tea-party comment was nothing in comparison to that.

What are you calling "Canonical would not have lobbied us to implement Mir support"?
They sent email, called to your phone, or used a proxy person to "force" your (kde devs) to support mir(don't need to be all this. If MS sent you 3 or 4 email it is sufficient to classify the case a lobby)? If yes, then I think that you reaction is justified.
But if the lobby it is only the "KWin will work just fine on Mir". Well.... I must say that you (kde devs) overacted.

You should quit writing blog posts :-) Your first post was the one that got you into all this mess. Even though it was technical in nature it sounded more like politics. Why talk about not accepting patches for upstream projects or even vetoing against them? With such posts you are immediately closing a door, even though there is no need for it. You should simply have written: "We currently do not have the manpower to support multiple display servers. We are concentrating on Wayland for now as it will be the display server used by most distributions."

As you said yourself, it is not that easy to support KWin on Mir. So just wait and see what happens. Maybe someone comes up with a patch, maybe not. Cross that bridge about accepting/rejecting or vetoing against patches when it comes to it. You would be in much better position now and then.

I agree. Nice, clean and quick. No flames, no hurt ego, no new enemies. It was the answer of Mint devs. And nobody said anything about then.

[Alex Sarmiento]

Of course. Open source developers are well known to express their opinions regardless of the company's interests ever so often. There are countless examples of this and I have done so, often as well. If you pay attention to open source projects, you would be well aware of this already.


"And Canonical is not forcing anyone to support MIR, yet they are free to promote it."

Mark Shuttleworth is personally attacking maintainers of several project including systemd and KWin. This is hardly the right way to promote Mir.

I did not know that people hire open source developers to just express their opinions . I thought people hire other people to work for them .

Is Mark Shuttleworth personally attacking maintainers of several projects including systemd and KWin??? Somebody should call the police and file assault charges against him. I thought that it was just a little rant in his personal blog after the systematic FUD against canonical. I did not known anything about the spree of violence