| Compiz and Beryl 3D projects merge |
Apr. 05, 2007
Analysis -- Several months after parting ways, the leaders of the two leading 3D compositing Linux desktop projects, Compiz and Beryl, have agreed to come back together.
Quinn Storm, one of Beryl's creators, wrote last September that "it at least 'feels' as though development is rather closed, with any possibility of getting code into the main source tree being at best a procedural headache."
Compiz in action
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Beryl in action
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The specific problem, according to the Open Software Wiki, that lead to "the fork was communication problems between the Compiz insider developer community at Novell and the community of users on the compiz mailing list. Patches submitted to compiz were not felt to be applied in a desired way, so in the summer of 2006, work began on a development fork for community contributions."
Frustrated by this inability to have their say in the Compiz project, Storm and others launched the Beryl fork to Compiz on September 18.
In response, David Reveman, a Novell developer and the Compiz maintainer, wrote on the Freedesktop Compiz list, "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!"
As time went on, the Beryl leadership began to question just how wise their move had been.
Robert Carr, another Beryl leader, explained in the Beryl development mailing list, "Around a month and a half ago some of us were discussing some rather radical changes to the design of beryl-core which we inherited from Compiz, this inevitably led to 'We should talk to Compiz about this to keep things synced', which even more inevitably leads to 'If we are going to talk to Compiz to keep our designs similar, so on, so forth, are our differences really so large that we need to be two separate projects?'"
Carr then approached David Reveman, a Novell developer and the Compiz maintainer, and found that he was "very [interested] in working with us."
Then, according to a Compiz press release, "After several weeks of discussion the leaders of Compiz and Beryl have agreed that the two communities shall reunite. This decision is supported by both David and Quinn and represents the majority decision of the administrators and developers in each community. At this early stage not a lot has been decided, but these are the main points of the agreement:"- Compiz will effectively split in to two divisions: Compiz-core and Compiz-extra.
- The Compiz-Core division will focus on core functionality. The name of the core package will remain compiz.
- The Compiz-Extra division, which includes plugins, decorators, settings tools and related applications and their developers, will merge with the Beryl project's programmers and offerings in these areas to form a new community with the temporary name of "Composite Community".
- The codebase of the new community will consist of the best plugins, decorators, settings tools and related applications from the Beryl and Compiz communities. We will create a code review panel consisting of the best developers from each community who will see that any code included in a release package meets the highest standards and is suitable for distribution in an officially supported package. Support for existing packages will be continued at least until the first stable release of the new project.
- The websites of each community will remain up and running until a new, user oriented site is completed. Since the forums are the heart of each community, they will be merged first. Once we have a single community forum we can use it to discuss the additional details, including the name of the new project, as well as setting the goals for the first release.
The end result of this for Linux desktop users should be a single, united and improved 3D desktop option.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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