Spring is in the air - things change, people are looking for things to try and new goals. I propose that we set ourselves a new goal: port GNOME to Wayland
Wayland has reached the 1.0 milestone recently and it has already had some good success in the embedded space. Many of us have silently assumed that Wayland is the future display system on Linux, and that we will get to using it eventually. But to reach its full potential, it needs the push of a full desktop porting project. I think GNOME is the right project for this and now is the right time for us to embrace Wayland. I am confident that the Wayland and X communities will be able to help us in reaching this goal. Initially, the main work in this effort will be to give gnome-shell the ability to work as a Wayland compositor - something that has already been demonstrated at last years Guadec in La Coruna. Then we need to port functionality for which we've so far relied on the X server, such as display configuration or keyboard accessibility features. Lastly, the GTK+ Wayland backend needs some love to reach parity with the X backend. We will retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode, so there is no need to rush and port all the worlds applications to Wayland. Porting of applications can happen independently and at its own pace. As far as a roadmap is concerned, I am fairly optimistic that we can have gnome-shell work as a Wayland compositor within 6 months. That will allow us to have optional Wayland support in GNOME 3.10, while still using X by default. Reaching this milestone by 3.10 will enable experimentation with Wayland, and should help us to take the next step for GNOME 3.12: a fully converted desktop, with no regressions. If we realize during 3.12 development that we won't be able to close all feature gaps in time for 3.12, it should be possible to keep gnome-shell on X for one more cycle without affecting the rest of the desktop too much. This proposal is mine, but it has been discussed with the release team, as well as with gnome-shell, GTK+ and Wayland maintainers. For more details about Wayland see: http://wayland.freedesktop.org For more details about this proposal, see http://live.gnome.org/Wayland Let me know what you think, Matthias _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
