wlroots whitepaper available

[Drew DeVault]

On 2017-12-28  8:38 PM, Emil Velikov wrote:
> On 28 December 2017 at 18:05, Drew DeVault <sir at cmpwn.com> wrote:
> Surely you are familiar that weston provides libweston with somewhat
> similar functionality, right?
> 
> Since your email is aimed at wayland-devel, it might be better to
> point out what part of libweston design does not fit your needs?
> 
> In my (somewhat limited) experience developers seem quite open about
> libweston. I cannot see any proposals from you - did I miss them, or
> you simply felt uncomfortable posting those to the list?

I briefly addressed our concerns with libweston in the paper. They boil
down to problems that generally arise from libweston being refactored
out of an existing compositor rather than being made from the ground up
as a support library. We didn't find it flexible enough or applicable to
niche compositor designs, and we found the codebase rather crufty with
lots of design problems from Weston bubbling up through libweston.

I had thought the libweston approach is fundamentally flawed and
supposed it'd be better to start from scratch. Comparing the two
libraries today, I conclude that my assessment was correct. Most who
work on wlroots agree that its approach is much better than libweston at
all levels. I think libweston is a fine effort for improving Weston in
its own right, but for building new compositors the wlroots approach
wins out.

--
Drew DeVault