State of Wayland protocol development

[Pekka Paalanen]

Hi all,

I'm not sure how much of this was directed at me, if any, but I feel
like I should state my position.


On Thu, 8 Oct 2015 13:43:06 -0700
"Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre at mecheye.net> wrote:

> ... snip ...
> 
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:

> >> This is what I believe we lost when Kristian stepped down, not just a
> >> gatekeeper. Someone who can help model solutions and solve problems.

That is a tough job that will need a lot of time and expertise. I try
to pick the fights where I already have some knowledge so I wouldn't
come out as totally dimwit while spending only limited time on the
matter.

> >> I would love to be that person for xdg-shell, of course, but you guys
> >> likely wouldn't trust me.

I have to personally admit that this is true. I fear that you might at
times lack the patience to wait for feedback from the KDE side.

Speaking of which, we don't seem to have any KDE person in CC. Maybe we
should add some now that the discussion turned to xdg-shell?

No-one with "kde" in their email address has commented on any even
remotely xdg-shell-related thing on the Wayland mailing list yet in
2015. Nor has anyone even CC'd any kde address...

> > I assume you mean me here, and that's not actually as true as you
> > think it is ...
> >
> > The issues I had with earlier xdg-shell development mostly centred
> > around your frustration with bikeshedding leading to pulling out of
> > all discussion and just periodically pushing changes to a GitHub
> > branch literally no-one knew about, with no plan to push it upstream.
> > I think it's fairly obvious that that isn't a sustainable approach for
> > a maintainer. There were a couple of others, but after our discussion
> > the other day I'm much more relaxed about that, and if you (or someone
> > else nominated) wanted to step up and actively push and proactively
> > steer xdg-shell maintenance in a way which was transparent to the
> > community, I'd be thrilled.
> 
> This is correct. A large amount of xdg-shell came out of one-on-one's
> with Kristian. Talking about the race conditions I was hitting, about
> experiences with wl_shell, things that made me uncomfortable, and
> possible solutions.
> 
> I doubt the same protocol, something we are both very proud of, would
> have arisen through design by committee^W ML discussion.

This is very much why I try to not get involved in the xdg-shell
discussions anymore. I don't know the field, so my comments would be
limited to useless committee-style rant, so I excuse myself for your
benefit. I stick my nose in too many places anyway.

Sounds like xdg-shell would hugely benefit from having one or two
people from each DE project engaging in a discussion off the Wayland
mailing list, until they agree on a high-level design of the minimal
protocol to build upon. Maybe it would be time to try again, as August
is now behind.

> > Part of my frustration with that was entangled with xdg-shell itself, which:
> >   - is lacking a clear path (at least, a clear documented path) to 1.0
> 
> My path, from a year ago, was in the form of "xdg-shell: Make stable".
> I thought it was ready at the time.
> 
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2014-July/016056.html
> 
> Several people had excellent editorial concerns, which we've since
> fixed. At some point, the consensus was that is that it's too early to
> make stable, and requires feedback from other communities like KDE,
> XFCE, and EFL.
> 
> Recently (meaning earlier today) an EFL developer has gotten back to
> me with some feedback. What we've decided might entail a more complex
> and breaking set of changes to xdg-shell to meet new requirements.
> Talk about adding new roles like tooltips and dialogs, and adding the
> configure event to xdg_popup as well.

This is exactly why I have wanted input from other DE projects before
we carve anything in stone, if the feedback indeed invalidates parts of
the current design.

> We'll see what these entail in the long run. These are sometimes
> fairly big hard-to-justify shifts, and I'm not sure if a mailing list
> is the best place to ask about them. I'm tempted it's a big too
> heavy-weight for trying out changes like this.
> 
> There was talk about a "present" request, which has been floating
> around the ML. I'd be happy to see it incorporated, but I don't have
> any power over the patch landing.

Who do you want to review that? Please poke those people.

I state this again, for the record, that I have no idea how a modern
desktop works, which makes me unqualified to review desktop shell
protocol designs on a high level, and hence I tend to ignore such
patches.

I can jump in for low-level and mechanical review once representatives
of the major DEs agree on a high-level design, but you will have to
explicitly poke me for that. I'd really like to see thumbs up from both
GNOME and KDE people first, because they a) they are the biggest
players, and b) they seem to be very different. Plus maybe a tiling DE.


Thanks,
pq
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