State of Wayland protocol development

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 29 September 2015 at 21:18, Carlos Garnacho <carlosg at gnome.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 6:34 PM, Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
>> It's probably most helpful to look at the context in which we had our
>> maintainers, and the way Wayland development has ebbed and flowed. krh
>> was building Wayland quite literally from scratch, at which point you
>> really need a single person to ensure that your vision is in any way
>> coherent; especially when a lot of the work really involved working on
>> Mesa/EGL, the kernel, and the toolkits simultaneously. By the time
>> Kristian stepped out, Wayland had got to the point where it's entirely
>> recognisable from today. I'd characterise the period of pq's active
>> single-person maintenance as building Weston: taking it from a
>> plaything to something shippable, not just radically remoulding it
>> internally, but also keeping a very close eye on its scope.
>
> I'd take this a bit further, and dare say that wayland+weston have
> evolved from a display-case demo to an ecosystem, where you no longer
> can even assume that interested parties doing protocol experiments are
> using weston as testbed.

Yeah, this is true. I do like having Weston being a universal testbed
for a few reasons; primarily because you can point people at it as an
easy way to run it (nested under Wayland or X11, native on KMS,
whatever), because it's easy to build and thus has probably the most
broad base. But then also if you have all the extensions together in
one place, you can see how they interact and work together: can you
have pointer gestures and pointer-lock working well together?

That being said, I appreciate it's pretty difficult to tell
Mutter/KWin/EFL developers that they should write it once for one
project, and then again natively. And update both every time they
change. But if you're seeking feedback from others, then having the
implementation in Weston is a really good common ground.

> Each intermediate stage has a better fitting
> maintenance and development model, I kind of agree that a "single
> maintainer" one might not be the best at this stage, even though the
> extra activity would be welcome for the shorter term.

Yeah, I agree.

>> This last question is definitely the more difficult one, and certainly
>> we've been guilty of arguing around each other whilst these larger
>> questions flail a little bit. But I think if we can resolve that, we
>> move away from a requirement to have someone who will in all
>> statistical probability try to burn out, and make better use of
>> everyone's time.
>
> One solution would be reaching out to other potentially interested
> parties, on most occasions there would be surely more than the one
> providing patches. In practice, those might be unaware of wayland
> workings and feel unqualified to do a proper review, so in the end
> someone is going to get introduced to some subject...

Totally agree, and definitely something we haven't been very good at.

Cheers,
Daniel