Also I would like to know if there is some sort of collaboration between ubport (and yunit) with the canonical mir team

about the mir support by canonical this is the actual situation
Also mate team seems interested in a mir-based wayland compositor/client. is the collaboration between all those project on this common objective possible and already started?
I hope in some news in the next Community Update

bye guys and thank you!

If you ask me what I think about convergence, I still think that it shouldn't be the first priority, since what has been left by Canonical still requires a lot of work. I still have some doubt that one single shell (which relies on many technologies written exclusively for Ubuntu Touch - e.g. the app confinement story, in particular) could satisfy the needs of both phones and desktops.

The question I ask myself a month ago was: could we expect people will still have interest on Unity 8 e.g. in an year? My answer now is that we can still put some effort on convergence, since now more people are involved on both projects, and keep everything alive.

Money and donations surely help, but I suspect there's still some trade-off. If you can't get developers to work on other parts of the platform too, it's hard to get things done. However this is not the case anymore

Unity8 is a complex software (~110k lines of code) which has a huge number of dependencies, from the Ubuntu UI Toolkit to GLib, from LightDM to LibIndicator and AccountServices, and all the other components specifically written for U8: Scopes library, Ubuntu Download Manager, Ubuntu Keyboard, MediaScanner2, MediaHub, Thumbnailer, and so on...

Mir is just one piece of the puzzle. Before touching any single line of code, it's important to know every single dependency of Unity 8, and be sure that all the building infrastructure works properly (i.e. being able to successfully run all the test suites of these components).

What really concerns me is not moving from Mir to Wayland, but getting a proper estimation of the development costs.

I'm not sure that going forward with the Canonical idea of convergence ("One OS running on every device") is the best way to get things done.

I have the impression that having a single shell on different devices (phones, tablets and desktops) adds a lot of complexity to a single software, and Canonical probably got stuck on that.

I haven't seen yet any other project trying to do the same: Microsoft decided to develop two different OS's: only "Universal apps" and the UI Toolkit are shared between the two platforms; KDE is doing the same, developing Plasma Mobile and a convergent UI Toolkit called Kirigami; and ChromeOS is not Android, but it's able to run its applications.

Also, there's another fact I haven't seen any mention yet: moving Ubuntu Touch to Xenial would actually break any compatibility with the apps and scopes currently available on the Ubuntu/Open Store. Canonical had an hard time (since 2015) to figure out how to do such transition, and they never moved from Vivid (i.e. Ubuntu 15.04) as base for their Ubuntu Touch images.

refs.

• 06 Aug '15 - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-5-Ubuntu-Wily-Headaches

• 12 Aug '16 - http://linux.softpedia.com/blog/ubuntu-touch-mobile-os-to-be-soon-rebased-on-ubuntu-16-04-lts-not-yakkety-yak-507264.shtml

• 09 Apr '17 - https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2017/04/09/%23ubuntu-touch.html

@WebDrake I like the idea of keeping Mir alive

we will not keep it alive. Canonical will do. Until further notice

In any case can we stick to the collaboration between yunit and UBPorts in this topic? And maybe have a different one to discus the mir vs wayland think?

Yes, fair enough. FWIW I wasn't trying to launch a mir-vs.-wayland discussion per se. My concern was more that in creating the yunit/UBPorts collaboration, it's important to have a clear picture of what's genuinely needed for things to work.

I want this collaboration to be a big success, and with that in mind I think it matters to very rigorously ask the question, "What's the minimum amount of work we need to do to get this codebase ready for a working desktop?"

In any case can we stick to the collaboration between yunit and UBPorts in this topic? And maybe have a different one to discus the mir vs wayland think?

Thinking out loud: will that be a good idea to continue relying on canonical? Maybe they will decide to drop it and move to something else after a year or so.

Well, what I'd suggest to you is that this is an argument from theory and speculation. The simplest thing is probably to actually talk to the folks at Canonical and ask to what extent you can engage on this. If they say, "No, definitely go with Wayland", there's your answer. But if they are interested in having you continue to use mir, and are prepared to take patches from you in support of your work, then that potentially takes a whole body of effort out of your hands for the foreseeable future.

If in a year or two you find yourself having to transition after all, then you'll be facing that challenge from the point of view of having a lot more experience of the collective codebase and how it all works. But in the meantime, why create work for yourselves until you know you have to do that work?

Thinking out loud: will that be a good idea to continue relying on canonical? Maybe they will decide to drop it and move to something else after a year or so.

@WebDrake It doesn't mention something about mir there

Yes it does. I said the thread, not the post

The particular comment in question (it's some way down in the discussion, I should have mentioned that) was highlighted in a later Reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/646mv8/mark_shuttleworth_i_came_to_be_disgusted_with_the/

Specifically, Mark Shuttleworth writes:

we have lots of IoT projects using Mir as a compositor so that code continues to receive investment. I agree, it's a very fast, clean and powerful graphics composition engine, and smart people love it for that.

Based on preliminary discussions we had we both agree that moving from mir to wayland is the direction we need to follow.

Out of curiosity, why?

According to the thread here, there is going to be ongoing investment in mir:
https://plus.google.com/+MarkShuttleworthCanonical/posts/7LYubpaHUHH

... so why attempt to move away from this piece of the stack unless it's provably necessary? It could allow for some interesting points of collaboration with Canonical's ongoing IoT efforts.

But no one of us (again correct me if I am wrong) did contribute to unity

So maybe we could keep it that way? Of course you will have a saying in any development related decisions and also any contributions/suggestions/modifications you might need are more than welcomed!