wayland-protocols scope and governance

[Scott Anderson]

Do we want anything formal regarding the removal of protocols?

The one comes to mind currently is xdg-shell-unstable-v5, which most (if 
not all?) compositors have dropped support for.

If something previously widespread falls out of usage and compositors 
remove their implementations, is there grounds for removing it from the 
registry? Should there be different treatment for protocols that are 
marked stable or unstable?

I don't think people would strongly object to xdg-shell-unstable-v5 
being removed, but hypothetically, if something like wl_shell was an 
extension, should it be removed? It has been completely supplanted by 
xdg-shell, and we don't want to encourage clients to use it.
wl_shell is core, so it wouldn't actually get removed, but the idea is 
if a similar situation happens again between extension protocols.

I suppose the real question is whether the registry is an up-to-date and 
relevant list of extensions that clients should realistically use or 
simply a list extensions that only gets added to over time.

Perhaps the solution is to keep the extensions but to just formally mark 
them as obsolescent and specify what they should be doing instead. It 
would be nice to not keep several versions of old unstable protocols, 
though.

Scott