Wayland and Weston 1.5.0 is released

[Kristian Høgsberg]

Hi,

I tagged 1.5.0 of Wayland and Weston and uploaded tar balls last
night.  Tarballs available from
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/releases.html as usual.  Magic SHA1
number for the tags and tar balls:

  bace08b4a531ea4b80b4cf4e953320bc48ed7efe  wayland-1.5.0.tar.xz
  3ac62cd6b6012f40e37b1bd7fc1e8178585905ca  wayland 1.5.0 tag

  42939c536bcdfbd92edb5e51af76ce7f0a4c6ed7  weston-1.5.0.tar.xz
  880193622024d7dc2b36421251d97b08da324570  weston 1.5.0 tag

In retrospect, this release was pretty quiet.  We ended up not merging
a whole lot of features, but we did fix a lot of bugs and at one point
the bug count [1] hit 14, the lowest in a long time.  I think that's a
pretty good feautre in itself.

Wayland

 • Use an internal event queue for wl_display events.  This allows the
   client library to dispatch delete_id and error events immediately,
   even if the default queue is not dispatched.

 • Wayland now uses non-recursive Makefiles.

Weston:

 • More work on xdg-shell, still not complete.  We did add the long
   missing minimize feature thought.  We expect to finalize the
   xdg-shell interface in time for 1.6, which will come out in time
   for GNOME Shell 3.14 to use.

 • The weston input stack was split out as a new library, libinput.
   Weston can be configured to link to libinput for input but defaults
   to the built in input code for now.  As the libinput API
   stabilizes, we'll remove the in-weston input code and make libinput
   a hard requirement.

 • Weston now uses the new Xwayland server.  The Xwayland code was
   refactored to be its own X server in the Xorg tree, similar to how
   Xwin and Xquartz and Xnest work.  A lot of the complexity and hacks
   in the old Xorg based Xwayland was about fighting Xorg trying to be
   a native display server, discovering input devices and driving the
   outputs.  The goal was to be able to reuse the 2D acceleration code
   from the various Xorg DDX drivers.  With glamor becoming a credible
   acceleration architecture, we no longer need to jump through those
   hoops and the new code base is much simpler and cleaner as a
   result.  Xwayland is upstream now and will be released with the
   1.16 Xorg release.

 • Animate window closing.  A minor feature, but it validates the
   mechanism for keeping surfaces around after the client that created
   them goes away.

 • Fullscreen shell.  The fullscreen shell provides a mechanism for a
   single client to provide a fullscreen surface, for kiosk-mode or
   appliance type use cases.

 • Weston now supports different color dephts on different outputs.

 • Weston now uses non-recursive Makefiles.

As I mentioned in the RC2 notes, we have a few things lined up for a
1.5.1 release and we'll try to get that out in a few weeks.  As for
1.6, we'll try to do four months from now, so something like this:

 • Mid August: alpha release, all big features landed, only minor,
   contained features after this.

 • Early September: RC1, only bug fixes after this.

 • One week later: RC2, only critical fixes.

 • Mid September: Release 1.6 should be RC2 ideally.

Going forward, for master, I'd like to change the work flow a bit.
The biggest problem with how we work today is me being a bottleneck at
best or flat out dropping patches.  So I'd like to open up commit
access to some of the key contributors.  Either people that have their
corner of weston that they maintain (for example Pekka and the
Raspberry Pi backend or Hardening and the RDP backend) or contributors
who have been part of the project for a while and understands the code
base well - or both.

Being able to review *and* commit a patch will hopefully increase the
incentive to review and I won't need to be around all the time for
things to move forwards.  I think everybody has enough common sense to
decide when something is a quick fix that can be committed right away
and when something needs wider discussion and concensus.  For anything
that touches core weston and in particular, anything that adds
protocol, we still want to see patches, reviews and discussion the
list before committing.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to 1.5, let's start talking about
what we want to do for 1.6.

Kristian

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=279166&bug_severity=blocker&bug_severity=critical&bug_severity=major&bug_severity=normal&bug_severity=minor&bug_severity=trivial&query_format=advanced&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&bug_status=PLEASETEST&product=Wayland