Trinity Accused Of Imaginary Commits And Accomplishments By KWin Developer


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The Trinity Desktop is something we have covered in the past.  The idea of maintaining a fork of a bygone desktop years after it has been succeeded seems to be a noble cause.  Especially offering it in a seemingly nicely packaged format for multiple distributions.  I use words like “seemingly” because I don’t have any direct experience with the project other than the fact that I have been blindly enthusiastic about it for quite some time now.

But one man is quick to disagree.  Martin Gräßlin, maintainer of KWin, is sceptical about Trinity’s latest release.  Being intimately involved with one of KDE’s major components, he has labeled claims made by the Trinity team as “bold statements”.  The Trinity team claims their latest release contains 141 bug fixes and 1193 applied patches.

After doing some research in git, Martin found an “unimpressive” 62 files changed, 410 insertions(+), 397 deletions(-).  It seems that it is pretty difficult to hide your claims with open source software that is hosted in a public repository.

Martin claims that a lot of the claimed changes were the result of a “stupid script” that reverted several changes.  It seems that Martin has been quite vocal about the Trinity project and has encouraged them to discontinue work on their fork several times in the past, to no avail.  The real trouble here?  Any valuable changes that have been made by the project have not been committed upstream.

From Martin’s Blog:

Disclaimer: this post represents my personal opinion and does not represent the opinion of any community I’m involved with. The motiviation of this post is mostly the fact that I tried several times to get the project to stop their fork.

For examples and a more clear explanation of the supposed damage done by the Trinity desktop project, take a look at Martin’s blog post where several examples and code snippets are analyzed.

Source | Martin’s Blog

Dean Howell
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Dean Howell has over a decade of experience with Linux and nearly 2 decades of experience with computers in general. Currently, Dean is Editor-in-chief of The Powerbase and also works for one of the world's largest providers of Linux-based NVRs.

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  • Thomas

    Even though I agree with Martin’s position (it is just a waste of manpower to put your effort into an unnecessary fork), I’d like to point out a few excerpts you cited from Martin’s blog post which might be misinterpreted when taken out of context:
    - The “141 bug fixes and 1193 applied patches” that the Trinity team states are for the whole DE, whereas the “62 files changed, 410 insertions(+), 397 deletions(-)” are for KWin only, so these two values should not be compared directly
    - The “stupid script” did not revert any changes, but the team had to manually revert changes that the script erroneously made.
    - Martin tried to convince the Trinity team specifically to discontinue the fork of KWin, assuming that it’s too complex for them to handle. Though he thinks that Trinity as a whole is a waste of effort, he does not talk about trying to get them to give it up entirely.
    You correctly reproduced Martin’s general argument, but I just want to forestall people claiming that Martin got it all wrong.

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