On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Dave Neary <[email protected]> wrote:
> You will need to presumably open some smaller-granularity bugs
> ("Increase corner and edge target sizes on windows for touch events",
> for example), against the appropriate module. Now, I don't know exactly
> what is involved, but I can guess that changes would be needed in
> Mutter, I guess, and it probably needs some work in XInput & Xorg to
> differentiate between touch & mouse events, and related work in Clutter
> and Mx.
>
> It's possible that the maintainers of one or all of these modules will
> reject your work as not aligned with their goals - you can try to
> propose that the patch be carried as a distro-specific diff, but that
> would be quite a big one, and there's a good chance that the request
> would be rejected by the package maintainers & MeeGo architects. So you
> should work with the Mutter/Mx/Clutter maintainers first to see if they
> agree with your way of doing things before you start doing the work, to
> give the best possible chance of your patch being accepted.
>
> Once you have a good idea that patches would be accepted, you can start
> working on the code for the problem.
>
> So first you'd make a patch proposal for XInput in Xorg, and a related
> patch request in Mx or Mutter, whichever is relevant (Thomas Wood,
> Thomas Friedrich or Emmanuele Bassi can tell you, I guess). They will
> review your patch, suggest changes, but (if you've done the work of
> getting everyone on the same page beforehand) these changes should only
> be minor. If, on the other hand, you propose patches for features the
> maintainers don't want, or you're doing things in a way they
> fundamentally disagree with, no amount of massaging the patch will help.
>
> So, once the XInput patch is accepted, and the Mx/Mutter patch is
> accepted, the changes will automatically propagate to the Netbook UX for
> the next version. Now, knowing that the next version of XInput will be
> releasing sometime in 2011, and Clutter (synced with GNOME I think)
> probably won't include your patch until September '11, MeeGo won't have
> it until the Winter '11 release, or perhaps Spring '12.
>
> Concretely, this is what "working upstream" actually means.
So given this alleged time frame (I'm thinking out loud, and I thank
you greatly for this discussion, albeit a bit off topic now to
Carsten's original topic) , how extreme do we follow upstream? In my
perception popular distros are doing something in between. I don't
think we'd have "usable out of the box" distro like Ubuntu (which is
for me almost a dream come true in terms of what I can offer to peopel
coming from other platforms) if Ubuntu was just 'following' upstream.
I know for fact that great measure had been taken to include distro
specific patches until an upstream piece of software is actually
usable or usable for general consumption.
But if we target MeeGo to be just a 'reference' platform, then
strictly following upstream is in place. And we can leave the "local
distro" patching for the vendors, something that is happening anyways
I guess. I don't believe personally we can "give MeeGo to our non
techie friends and tell them how great it is" if it will always only
follow upstream.
As an example, gnome cups manager lacked support for controlling IPP
printer detection in gnome for a long time. After realizing upstream
is not going to deliver this, I did the GUI part and a core dev did
the backend part and we released this feature to the great
satisfaction of, in this case, corporate users[0]. Is this something
we can hope to see in MeeGo in your opinion? Anybody else reading this
thread? :)
Again, I couldn't resist and I'm brainstorming out loud. Feel free to
correct me or fill in with anything not accurate.
-Sivan
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