Collaboration on standard Wayland protocol extensions

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 29 March 2016 at 05:01, Drew DeVault <sir at cmpwn.com> wrote:
> You don't provide any justification for this, you just say it like it's
> gospel, and it's not. I will again remind you that not everyone wants to
> buy into a desktop environment wholesale. They may want to piece it
> together however they see fit and it's their god damn right to. Anything
> else is against the spirit of free software.

I only have a couple of things to add, since this thread is so long,
so diverse, and so shouty, that it's long past the point of
usefulness.

Firstly, https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-January/msg00861.html
is a cliché, but the spirit of free software is empowering people to
make the change they want to see, rather than requiring the entire
world be perfectly isolated and abstracted along inter-module
boundaries, freely mix-and-matchable.

Secondly, you talk about introducing all these concepts and protocols
as avoiding complexity. Nothing could be further from the case. That
X11 emulates this model means that it has Xinerama, XRandR,
XF86VidMode, the ICCCM, and NetWM/EWMH, as well as all the various
core protocols. You're not avoiding complexity, but simultaneously
shifting and avoiding it. You're not avoiding policy to create
mechanism; the structure and design of the mechanism is a policy in
itself.

Thirdly, it's important to take a step back. 'Wayland doesn't support
middle-button primary selections' is a feature gap compared to X11;
'Wayland doesn't have XRandR' is not. Sometimes it seems like you miss
the forest of user-visible behaviour for the trees of creating
protocol.

Fourthly, I think you misunderstand the role of what we do. If you
want to design and deploy a modular framework for Legoing your own
environment together, by all means, please do that. Give it a go, see
what falls out, see if people creating arbitrary external panels and
so find it useful, and then see if you can convince the others to
adopt it. But this isn't really the place for top-down design where we
dictate how all environments based on Wayland shall behave.

I don't really hold out hope for this thread, but would be happy to
pick up separate threads on various topics, e.g. screen
capture/streaming to external apps.

Cheers,
Daniel