Suggestion to drop [t|k]win from Trinity and replace it by KWin4

Hi Trinity developers, first of all: this is a serious suggestion and no try to troll you or anything in that area. Today I did some bug triaging for old bugs reported against KWin. With old I mean bugs reported against KDE 3.1 till 3.5. While I did that I realized how many bugs we fixed in the window manager after the release of KDE 4. All of those bugs are still valid for KDE 3.5 and your users do not benefit from the fixes done by us. The last commit done to KWin 3.5 was on October 3rd 2008[1]. Since then we fixed 617 bugs[2] and implemented 119 user wishes[3]. Just think about theses numbers. All those fixes your users are missing... I also just did a short count on our commits and only last month we had more than 50 commits, although we entered feature freeze. You see KWin is an active, maintained and developed project. Some weeks ago I heard that Krita developers requested a different name for the fork in Trinity, so I did the same for the fork of KWin. Reason was that I had looked at some commits done to the fork some time ago and considered them all in the area from plain wrong to harmful. I just wanted to make clear that we as upstream developers do not have anything to do with the development of this product especially as none of the patches were presented for review (all changes to KWin are peer reviewed). I had been thinking about the Trinity/KWin relationship for quite some time and todays triaging showed me that this just does not make sense. I do understand that you want to provide a KDE 3.5 desktop experience. This is great and I am all for it. But KWin 4 is a clear continuation of KWin 3. It is not a rewrite like other parts of the desktop. It is the same application, with more features, less bugs and in general a better performance. I am only aware of one feature that got dropped from KWin 4 and this could be easily maintained in a separate branch. Working on a window manager and compositor comes with great responsibility. It is one of the most complex parts of the desktop environment and introduced bugs affect all users and can be really harmful and very difficult to debug. Developing a window manager is not trivial and you have to understand how the window manager works, which - with all respect - is not the case in twin[4,5]. This is not surprising - it took me more than two years to learn KWin and there are still many areas where I am glad to have a team which can review suggested changes. Therefore I suggest to you to discontinue the work on twin and instead switch to KWin 4 as provided, developed and maintained by the KDE community. We are currently the window manager to three different desktop environments ranging from mobile to desktop. I am sure that we can support a fourth one which used to be the only one some time ago. For Trinity this gives about 60 kSLOC less code to maintain and develop. It removes one of the most complex parts and gives you the possibility to work on what really matters: providing a KDE 3.5 desktop experience by maintaining and improving kicker and kdesktop. Kind Regards Martin Gräßlin KWin maintainer [1] http://websvn.kde.org/?view=revision&revision=867241 [2] https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=… [3] https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=… [4] http://git.trinitydesktop.org/cgit/tdebase/commit/kwin?id=1f40ada72d693d681… [5] http://git.trinitydesktop.org/cgit/tdebase/commit/kwin?id=9cc1e2c1aa2629d49…