Weston SDK

[Kristian Høgsberg]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 11:51 AM, Casey Dahlin <cdahlin at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 11:27:22AM -0500, Kristian Høgsberg wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I made a little experiment last night:
>>
>>   http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~krh/overlay-plugin
>>
>> It's an out-of-tree weston plugin.  It's just a silly little overlay
>> that you can pop up with mod-space, but the interesting part here is
>> that it's building outside weston [1].  Current, that works by copying
>> the header files that defines the weston <-> plugins API, but I'd like
>> to start thinking about how to formalize this process.  I don't think
>> it should be a big problem, it more or less boils down to:
>>
>>  - Interface version in headers and at runtime
>>
>>  - Header files installed in /usr/include/weston
>>
>>  - pkg-config file
>
> This is all begging the question: what is the purpose of Weston. Graphics
> developers I talk to who I don't see on this list still refer to it as an
> "example compositor." They aren't awaiting a plugin API, they're awaiting a
> toolkit library so they can write their own compositors.
>
> Has this been miscommunicated? Because it increasingly seems like Weston is
> being prepared for actual use.

A lot of the Wayland coverage and discussion is focused on the
desktop, which means gnome-shell or kwin etc becoming Wayland
compositors.  Meanwhile, if you're building an embedded product, say a
set-top box, a car ui or even mobile use cases, weston does provide
most of what you need to build a custom UI (ie, not pulling all the
legacy of a traditional Linux desktop environment).    In the past, a
lot of solutions have been built by taking a naked X server and
putting a custom UI on top.  Weston presents a modern, minimal
alternative to X in these cases and as such we're treating it as a
product in its own right.

Kristian