Posted on 2007-06-21
After a lot of back and forth, some fumbling with a vote and a lot of suggestions, we finally managed to find a name. Compiz Fusion. There are a lot of people relieved that we finally managed to find a name. Myself included.
We ended up weighing developer/contributer opinions higher than the users in this specific issue, after all, this is our work we're naming. But the process was made in such a way that we found a name that the most developers didn't dislike. Sort of the opposite of a vote for a winner. The plan was to have the users decide between the remaining names, but in the end, there wasn't really any names remaining.
Personally, I'm very happy with this method. I never thought it would take this much effort to find a name, but the users should know that we spent a lot of time on finding this name, and every imaginable option was explored. There were a lot of concerns we had to honor: We didn't want a name that was a "morf" between Beryl and Compiz (Like Coryl, and many also felt Coral was just this). We also had to honor the wishes of the people who will work most with the name.
There are still a lot of things we need to decide, and it's not easy. There are still many hot debates going on, or that will have to be started. We need to decided what to do with forums, domain names and whatnot. Besides that, we have to find a more permanent way to manage the project.
Code-wise, we're going forward, luckily. So most of this is tiresome squabbling. But we still have to deal with it, and there are some issues with how we've worked on code too. Many of us feel we need a more proper planning phase for the development process, this is specially true for the settings system, which was developed by a close group of former Beryl developers. This isn't something unique to the Compiz Fusion project though, we kinda wanted to do that in the Beryl Project too, and many of us feel it's a valid point in the Compiz development cycle too.
Now that we have a name, packagers are getting to work. Guillaume (iXce) and Alex (nesl247) on the Beryl side of things are sorting out git-renaming (yet again) and forum work, Dennis (onestone) seems to be doing the build-tuneups, and all of will probably adjust our individual code bits to fit to the new name. Because I tend to stay away from the longer arguments on the mailinglist, I haven't really spoken to Rico lately, but I hope he can get to work too, even if he's not exactly best friends with all the other developers and contributors at the moment.
So, for those who're confused:
Compiz - The original project. Now only the core and a select few original plugins, located at freedesktop.org and the main developer is still David Reveman.
Beryl - A discontinued fork of Compiz, after "compiz-quinn", a community set of patches, had drifted too far apart from the original project. Introduced many features, both in the core and outside. And attracted many developers. And the fork it self was the source of much debate.
Compiz Extras - A sort of "division" consisting of the people who worked on compiz, but the extras were not core-fixes. The concept is similar to what made Beryl what it is, but also very different. It was to include a wider set of plugins and tools. Now discontinued.
Opencompositing - A common name used for the merged project and more, does not include the core. This was meant mostly as a temporary name, but what becomes of this terms has yet to be decided. It will most likely be dropped.
CompComm - Another name for the merged project, not including core, more of a shorthand for "Compiz Community". The opencompositing.org git repositories sported compcomm/ prefixes, this was mostly done for practical reasons. This name will be discontinued entirely.
Compiz Fusion - A community project forged by the merge between the Compiz Extras and the Beryl project. This does NOT include a core, as the core changes in Beryl are either being scrapped, or re-written for the core Compiz project. Compiz Fusion will sport settings tools, more plugins, helpfull scripts to start Compiz with the Compiz Fusion plugins, and basicly anything related to Compiz that's not the core.