Weston SDK

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:27:22 -0500
Kristian Høgsberg <hoegsberg at gmail.com> 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
> 

If we take this one step further and think about supporting the
replacement of, say, weston-desktop-shell client, we will need the
protocol XMl files, too. Also language binding kits would probably like
to have wayland.xml available from Wayland installation instead of
maintaining a copy.

Could [1] be solved while at it?

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55183

> Now, I don't want this to slow down what we can do with weston
> internals, so this won't be stable API across major releases for the
> forseeable future.  But for a stable branch we should be able to avoid
> breaking the plugin API.  For 1.0 for example, we haven't changed the
> API or ABI at all.  
> 
> Another caveat is that this doesn't imply that the exported API is
> particular useful or coherent.  I think what we have is fairly decent
> though, it's just that we never developed it with an eye to be an
> external, self-contained API.  So we may be exposing too little or too
> much or there may be broken or inconsitent stuff in there.  But I
> think the first step towards working this out is to try to expose the
> API and just be careful about not promising too much in
> terms of usefulness or stability initially.


Thanks,
pq