Apparent impass between GTK+ and Ubuntu on Wayland backend

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Sun, 6 Jan 2013 01:13:31 -0500
darxus at chaosreigns.com wrote:

> Ubuntu said they're not willing to have their GTK+ package depend on a
> Wayland package (when using GTK+ only with X), requesting the Wayland
> backend be moved out to a dynamically loadable library:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+3.0/+bug/954352
> (Comment 61 on.)
> 
> GTK+ said "No":  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=690381
> 
> 
> How should this work in major binary package based distros?
> 

The lauchpad bug pretty much seems to say, that Ubuntu cannot have GTK+
depend on libwayland, because Wayland conflicts with proprietary
drivers. Did I understand that right? I didn't find any other
explanation there.

I wonder if they realize, that libwayland and xkbcommon have absolutely
nothing to do with any graphics drivers. There is no reason to make
libwayland conflict with any proprietary or other driver, so I'm
confused why they say that Wayland conflicts with them.

The two other reasons I can guess why they don't want to enable Wayland
are:
- If enabling Wayland for GTK+ requires the wayland-egl API from libEGL;
  does it? If it does, then that would conflict with proprietary
  drivers, if it causes a runtime linking failure.
- They really do not want apps to indirectly link to two more libraries
  at runtime for no use.

Maybe you could dig more into why they say that Wayland, whatever they
refer to, conflicts with anything?

Is it not possible to build GTK+ and its dependencies so, that for X it
has all the features, and for Wayland is limited to software
rendering only? That would avoid a possible wayland-egl API
requirement, and perhaps be better than nothing?

Or maybe I'm just missing something obvious, since I don't have
experience in packaging.


Thanks,
pq