[ANNOUNCE] wayland-protocols

[Jonas Ådahl]

Hi,

With this E-mail I'd like to officially announce the new repository for
Wayland protocols and protocol development: wayland-protocols.

The repository can be cloned using

  git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols

and be viewed using a web browser by going to

  http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols

The purpose of this repository is to decouple Wayland protocol
development from the implementation in weston. wayland-protocols will
have its own releases not coupled with with wayland/weston releases and
will not carry any implementations.

Some benefits of introducing a separate repository with separate
releases are the reduced burden on always having a complete weston
implementation before introducing a new protocol, and the fact that one
can introduce changes or additions to non-core Wayland protocol without
having to wait a new wayland/weston release.

With this said, developers are still urged to implement wayland-protocols
protocols in weston, as weston is still the reference compositor, and as
such it is most often within weston's scope to carry such
implementations.

At the point of this announcement, there is yet to be a release of
wayland-protocols, but I expect a release to be made in the not to
distant future. In its current state, wayland-protocols contain the
following unstable protocols:

 . fullscreen shell
 . input method
 . linux dmabuf
 . pointer gestures
 . text input
 . xdg shell 

And will probably soon contain the following stable protocols:

 . viewporter (currently scaler)
 . presentation timing

In progress wayland-protocols additions are

 . tablet support
 . relative pointer
 . pointer constraints

Other road map:y things for wayland-protocols worth noting is generated
protocol documentation and C API (see Peter's wayland-scanner patches).

I'd urge anyone to take a look at the README[0] file in toplevel directory
in the repository for details about various aspects including how to deal
with multiple versions of unstable protocols, how to contribute changes
and new protocols, stabilization procedures etc. I won't duplicate all
those details here in this E-mail.

If there are no further major objections to naming, conventions,
procedures etc, I think we are pretty close to a first release.


Jonas

[0] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/tree/README