[arch-dev-public] [RFC] Add Wayland/Weston

[Jan de Groot]

On vr, 2013-02-08 at 10:20 +0100, Thomas Bächler wrote:

> I appreciate your effort and have no objection against adding Wayland.
> 
> However, to limit people's enthusiasm about this, I just want to remark
> that having Wayland installed now is not incredibly useful: Weston is
> AFAIK the only compositor available at this time, and it is, as you
> mention, a demo (there was talk of some tiling WM being ported to
> Wayland, I forgot the name). Also you'll use XWayland most of the time.
> 
> When Qt5 gets released and Qt4 applications are ported (which will
> likely happen for all Qt4 applications), there'll be at least many
> applications that can use Wayland natively. When KDE is ported to Qt5,
> we'll also get kwin as a more feature-rich Wayland compositor.
> 
> I didn't read about the GTK situation yet, but I guess GTK3 has Wayland
> support already.

This is my main concern for Wayland at this moment. Though it looks cool
to support new technology and having released versions of Wayland with
1.x versioning, I doubt there's much use for it at this moment. Running
X inside of wayland is a nice feature for apps that aren't ported yet,
but if you only run apps that aren't ported yet, there's no use for
Wayland at the moment.

Anyways, to get everything out of Wayland, this needs:
- wayland backend in GTK3
- GL backend in cairo (experimental)
- EGL/GLES backends in Mesa

For GTK3 I don't think there's a big issue, it's just a backend
resulting in some additional files and (optional?) dependencies.

For Cairo, the GL backend is experimental. Given the fact that upstream
fails to provide a stable release model for cairo (every released
version is taken from master, featuring regressions), I wouldn't even
think about enabling an experimental backend there.

For Mesa, we have to look at how we can implement this without breaking
existing stuff. I haven't looked much at Mesa recently, so I can't tell
much about this.