On Sunday, December 26, 2010, Martin Gräßlin wrote: > let me break the Christmas silence by writing a long post about the current > state of KWin and where we are heading towards in 2011. As this also is
thanks for sharing; these kind of "look ahead" communications are so useful to ensuring things stay on track and to encourage renewed energy and commitment. so: thanks :) > Sorry that it is that long. compared to my average "where we are" emails, you are a study in brevity and clarity. ;) > *Plasma and KWin* > I consider Plasma and KWin as the integrated product of the KDE workspaces. > Both products depend on each other and do not make much sense without the > other. i'd word this slightly differently: they make the most sense when used together, and we shouldn't be afraid to get more benefits out of that relationship. i do think it makes complete sense to use kwin without plasma-desktop, and plasma-desktop without kwin. i also think that when people do that, it's acceptable that there will be a degredation of features. the basics should all still work, something that will keep us honest as developers and not start taking shortcuts that violate principles of encapsulation and focus, but i am completely fine with the idea of charging ahead with great integration to bring all the really great features we can imagine to the front. > This is also reflected when looking at our developer base: we have > almost a 100 percent match. We currently see great improvements on the > syncing of our working procedures. Using reviewboard, having common > processes for git and so on. I hope with the switch to kdelibs coding > style (scheduled for directly after import of KWin-GLES) and removing bug > mails for KWin mailinglist to have improved the situation for Plasma devs. this all fills me with great hope for the future of our projects. this is so obviously the best path we can hope for and it is so great that we have found ourselves a way to get onto it. :) > If there is anything from a Plasma perspective to improve it even more, > please let me know, I am open to all suggestions. and the other way around from the plasma perspective, too. having the input of kwin on plasma is just as valuable to us as hopefully our input is to kwin. :) > *GSoC* you're going through the same pains we have in plasma and reaching very similar conclusions :) i think it's useful to have a few speculative projects, but keep most of them focused, building on what's already there and with people who have had some interface with the project already. > *Manpower* > Manpower is in my opinion the biggest problem of KWin. We are just three > developers + Chani and Ivan working on activity related code. I would like > to get more Plasma developers working on KWin. It should be a natural > thing to touch KWin code and to add new features in KWin if it makes > sense. Here I would like to know from the developers sometimes working on > KWin what needs to be improved. from my perspective, it's all the things you already touched on: modularity so it's easy to get moving, code readability (i find the current style very difficult to read, tbh) and in some places documentation (even just basic outlines, hand holding isn't strictly necessary :) > Where are things missing to grab the code more easily. we really need projects.kde.org to ship xml descriptions and for those to be referencable from kdesrc-build. once we have that, we can bang the drums repeatedly to the testing+developers audience about how easy it is to get a KDE build up and running. that remains one of the most daunting tasks to date. > I am currently trying to recruit a new developer and I would like to see i have found that the easiest (though not necessarily "easy" ;) way to do this is to have an intriguing story for people which gets them interested and a set of concrete tasks they can dive right into. we could as a combined kdebase- workspace dev community start in on a subtle developer recruitment campaign in our blogs and elsewhere in 2011. we all need more and new blood :) > With Wayland many things have to be moved into the compositor, like what's > today kdm, screensavers, etc etc. So we really need to get Plasma devs > starting working on KWin ;-) before we hit kdm and screensavers (widening the scope even further), i'd like to see us get our plasma-desktop house in order. the presentation of the dashboard and wallpapers, screen edge handling and effects (e.g. the panel glow), etc. we've done great work to date with pushing more and more into kwin, but we have a few remaining "great ideas, just shouldn't be in the plasma shell" features :) -- Aaron J. Seigo humru othro a kohnu se GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43 KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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