Collaboration on standard Wayland protocol extensions

[Drew DeVault]

On 2016-03-29 11:45 AM, Daniel Stone wrote:
> 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.

I should rephrase: it's against the spirit of Unix. Simple, composable
tools, that Do One Thing And Do It Well, is the Unix way. Our desktop
environments needn't and shouldn't be much different.

> 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.

I disagree. I think this is just a fundamental difference of opinion.

> 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.

I think you're missing what users are actually using. You'd be surprised
at how many power users are comfortable working with tools like xrandr
and scripting their environments. This is about more than just
xrandr-like support, too. There's definitely a forest of people using
screen capture for live streaming, for instance.

> 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've already seen this. It's been around for a long time. I don't know
if you live in a "desktop environment bubble", but there's a LOT of this
already in practice in the lightweight WM world. Many, many users, are
using software like i3 and xmonad and herbstluftwm and openbox and so on
with composable desktop tools like dmenu and i3bar and lemonbar and so
on _today_. This isn't some radical experiment in making a composable
desktop. It's already a well proven idea, and it works great. I would
guess that the sum of people who are using a desktop like this
perhaps outnumbers the total users of, say, enlightenment. I'm just
bringing the needs of this group forward.

Some of your email is just griping about the long life of this thread,
and you're right. I think I've got most of what I wanted from this
thread, I'm going to start proposing some protocols in new threads next.

--
Drew DeVault