Find a way to work together

[tmandry]

I'm glad that you found the Glide codebase a good starting point for Rift, and I'm impressed by all the work and energy you've put into it. You've actually accomplished so much of what I wanted to do for Glide once I had the base layers working.

From looking at your work, roadmap, and values, I think we're quite well aligned on what we want to accomplish. I appreciate you writing those down; I'd been meaning to do that for Glide and put out a call for co-contributors but clearly I should have done that earlier. You've begun turning Rift into the real project I wanted Glide to be, which is not something I expected, but I respect what you've done.

It also looks like you've pulled in recent work from Glide like the group indicators, and I think there are bug fixes that we'd benefit from sharing in both directions.

Given all that, I don't see a reason for us to continue working separately. I'd like to discuss potentially merging the projects together. What are your thoughts?

If this is easier to discuss over email or Discord feel free to reach out that way; you can find my email on my profile and my username is the same everywhere.

[kerryj89]

This was something I thought of also, like why aren't they working together? Was there a falling out? Was yours more like a PoC? Were you unresponsive to PR? (I didn't check that far obviously). I don't know how much y'alls projects have diverged, but it would be amazing to have two experts/maintainers on this (or were you hoping it would take on the Glide name?). One thing I find for better or worse is that window tiling devs tend to be super opinionated and often shoot down ideas rather quickly so hopefully you guys don't butt heads and cause a... rift 🥁 I find @acsandmann to be quite refreshing in that regard in that even though he might not agree, he lets things play out a bit and gets involved in discussion. Anyway, +1 from me if you guys work well together :)

[brianwk]

I was wondering the same thing, but also recognized that Rift met my needs while Glide did not.

[tmandry]

I'm using Glide as my daily driver and I consider it more than a PoC now. But my pace has slowed down and I wasn't yet adding in many options for integration and customization as Rift has. They share a config system.

I suspect @acsandmann just wanted to build their vision without asking somebody else for permission which I understand. But my goal was to design an architecture that is flexible and can handle different opinionated ways of expressing interactions on top. Looking at Rift I feel pretty good about how that has gone, plus the differences don't seem overly drastic or out of step. Virtual workspaces definitely seems like the biggest one, and I've separately started to think that they're worth it.

From what I can tell I think we are aligned on major features, though I should go write down my personal roadmap. There might be disagreement on minor things to cut etc. but my feeling is that most of the complexity still comes from working around weird macOS behaviors, which is shared work. Given that we're mostly aligned maybe "additive" compromise is the answer, plus an experimental designation for features that allows them to be less stable and lower quality, so we can separate discussion about "should this exist" from "is it ready".

If we continue on as two projects we should at least make it so patches are easier to share.

[BarutSRB]

It’s a great idea as both you, @tmandry and @acsandmann are highly skilled, and it would be a shame not to combine your skills. Collaborating would speed the project up, whereas working separately might waste time and effort. Working together would help make Rift a go to tiling WM for macOS users. Ultimately, though, the decision is up to @acsandmann and merge other contributors.

[dagrlx]

It's great that this space has opened up to discuss a topic that I know would benefit the Linux/MacOS user community. Regardless of what the developers of both projects decide, I hope that whatever happens will be a source of personal and professional growth for everyone involved and for the community. I came to Rift after reading a comment on the Hyperspace project, and I'd wanted to try something different from Aerospaces for a while, looking to see if there was something better and to avoid certain problems with Aerospaces that bothered me.

Even though Rift is a young project with many things to improve or fix, I decided to take a chance and stay here for one reason I find valuable: @acsandmann seems like a good listener, patient, and has something of the old school—altruism and humility. I hope I'm not wrong; this is something I miss from the old school of Linux, when LUGs (Linux User Groups) existed, where users met to share knowledge and experiences about Linux.

When I learned the word Ubuntu and its meaning, I adopted it as a life lesson for my personal development: I am who I am because of who we all are. This aligns with what I apply in my life: you grow, I grow. God gave each of us unique abilities that make us who we are and allow us to contribute to the community.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank @BarutSRB, because I know that from Hyperspace he has sought to support and improve the ideas of others. I'm not a developer; I've never liked programming. I'm a sysadmin, but from this perspective, when I can, I help by testing the code and providing insights from a technical user's point of view.

I wish the Rift and Gilde projects all the best. Although I haven't tried the latter, perhaps the best thing would be to combine two minds on a single objective, a single project. For my part, I remain patient because sometimes, during periods of intense work, Rift has taken a turn for the worse (haha), but it has grown and is establishing itself as one of the leading projects in this tiling window manager segment.

I almost forgot to thank @brianwk, who has dedicated many hours to testing and integrating Rift into his workflow. I haven't had much time these last two weeks.

Best of luck to everyone, and long live Rift!

[BarutSRB]

Couldn't have said it better, thank you and I do agree with what you said 100%

[tmandry]

To answer a question posed by @kerryj89, I am not picky about the name. The situation I want to avoid is users being confused about which project they should use and why.

One way to fix that is to have a combined project. In this model @acsandmann and I would be co-maintainers and we would work out a way to leverage our respective strengths.

Another way that can work is to keep the projects separate but have a clear delineation between them, e.g. Rift is the fast-moving project trying out new ideas and Glide focuses on quality and stability. As new features are proven in Rift they can eventually make their way into Glide, and the projects can share fixes, etc.

In any case, I'd like to align the licensing between the projects while it's early days so we can keep our options open moving forward (#200).

[unsecretised]

Maybe instead of doing some fancy migration to a different project (which would require almost an entire fresh start) we could simply just PR this project since (according to the star count, its more popular). However I do agree on the communication bit where github as the main form of communication just doesn't cut it. As for licensing, its up to acsandmann to choose