wayland-protocols scope and governance

[Simon Ser]

On Friday, September 6, 2019 10:45 AM, Jonas Ådahl <jadahl at gmail.com> wrote:

> >                       2.2. Protocol inclusion requirements
> >
> >
> > a. All protocols found in the "xdg" and "wp" namespaces at the time of writing
> > are grandfathered into their respective namespace without further discussion.
> > b. Protocols in the "xdg" and "wp" namespace are eligible for inclusion only if
> > ACKed by at least 3 members.
> > c. Protocols in the "xdg" and "wp" namespace are ineligible for inclusion if
> > if NACKed by any member.
> > d. Protocols in the "xdg" and "wp" namespaces must have at least one open-source
> > client implementation & two open-source server implementations to be eligible
> > for inclusion.
>
> Maybe this was discussed in the past, but why two? If we'd travel back
> in time, it'd stall the introduction of xdg-foreign (took quite a while
> for a second server implementation to show up), which falls within the
> xdg namespace scope, and it'd block addition of protocols only
> interesting to a single compositor but multiple clients/toolkits (e.g.
> something very tiling specific that maybe only wlroots would care about,
> or something currently in gtk-shell that may be relevant for GNOME
> Shell, gtk and Qt, but not for other compositors).
>
> Same for protocols like the tablet interface; I think it's too much of a
> requirement to require the protocol author to provide TWO
> implementations for such a protocol, and relying on others to implement
> your protocol in their own compositors is quite a lot to ask IMHO. The
> end result is more likely we end up with more things like
> `gtk_primary_selection` instead of going upstream first.

That's a very fair point. I think it would make sense to require more
implementations for unstable → stable upgrades (which are very
important, we can't fix those later). But for unstable protocols, you
do have a point.

I guess the original intention was to make a difference between xdg/wp
inclusion and other namespaces: it should be harder to get a protocol
merged in xdg/wp.

Thoughts?