[Using GMail, so this is going to be terrible for patch reviewing] On 22 February 2018 at 08:32, Pekka Paalanen <ppaala...@gmail.com> wrote: > From: Pekka Paalanen <pekka.paala...@collabora.co.uk> > > I have the feeling that we would benefit from a documented process on > how to propose cross-desktop extensions. Right now, contributors may > send a proposal to wayland-devel list only, be met with complete > silence, and walk away frustrated. > > I believe it is wrong to expect Wayland upstream developers to judge > desktop extensions unless they are also desktop developers. At least > personally I lack the knowledge to properly evaluate desktop extensions, > and even if I didn't, I could not speak for the projects who would need to > carry the actual implementation. > > Desktop developers might see wayland-devel as not-our-turf, so it is > easy to just ignore the emails, and they might get lost between all the > other traffic there. > > To avoid the deadlock silence of "not my concern", I propose we set up a > guideline to explicitly contact the most influential desktop projects, > and list their contact information.
Thanks for looking into this, it's very much appreciated. > Another important part of the guideline is how to formulate the > proposal. I attempted to write down the question so that it would be > relatively easy to answer without mandating a considerable review > effort. Getting the first "good idea"/"bad idea" comments is what should > get the ball rolling. > > Complete review of an extension proposal from multiple parties should > not be necessary to have the extension land in wayland-protocols as an > unstable protocol. If projects are in general positive for a proposal, > it should land in wayland-protocols as unstable. At this stage we would > expect projects to start picking it up at their own pace (e.g. by the > original developer submitting implementations), seeing how > implementations fit them, and propose changes - since the extension is > unstable, it can be revised freely. However, the requirements for > declaring an extension as stable should include explicit reviews from > several projects. > > Signed-off-by: Pekka Paalanen <pekka.paala...@collabora.co.uk> > --- > CONTRIBUTING | 63 > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > Makefile.am | 1 + > 2 files changed, 64 insertions(+) > create mode 100644 CONTRIBUTING > > diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING b/CONTRIBUTING > new file mode 100644 > index 0000000..ab729b2 > --- /dev/null > +++ b/CONTRIBUTING > @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ > + Contributing extensions for the desktop > + > + > +Wayland-protocols has a requirement for contributed extensions to be > generally > +useful. This excludes extensions that are not expected to be used outside of > a > +single compositor and/or toolkit project. For desktop extensions this means > +that a proposal needs to have support from multiple projects. > + > +When proposing a Wayland protocol extension with the intention to make it a > +cross-desktop standard in the long run, it may be hard to get sufficient > +feedback. To help gauging support for the proposal, one should present the > +following question to the desktop related projects: > + > + Would you accept and merge an implementation of this Wayland protocol > + extension, if that implementation met your project's quality standards > + and some other projects agreed to do the same? > + > +This question avoids the pitfalls of demanding work from others, like > +demanding them to carefully review your proposal or demanding them to > +implement or promising to implement it. Such demands are often ignored due to > +priority reasons. Instead, the point here is to get an acknowledgement on > +whether the proposal is a good idea. > + My main worry is that "acknowledgement" seems to imply "merge as is (plus or minus quality standards)", but no mention is made about feedback on design. I fear that cross-posting to a dozen mailing lists is going to make discussion and feedback problematic from the perspective of the people proposing a new protocol, as well as people commenting on it. Having a single place for discussions would be a good thing; that's typically what the wm-spec list was meant to be used for, back in the EWMH days. Maybe we should resurrect the wm-spec list for Wayland protocol discussions, now that EWMH discussions are not "hot" any more, and use the list of addresses below as a mechanism to contact interested parties and direct them to wm-spec — if we want to avoid every person involved even tangentially to toolkits and Wayland compositors to subscribe. Unless, of course, you want all discussions about Wayland protocols to happen on wayland-devel, which would be equally good to me, but may escalate the traffic on the list. Before you answer my questions: I'm fully aware that you have kind of outlined a process in the commit message, but it's probably worth it to have the same process outlined in the document that people are going to read. :-) > +The proposal with the above question should be posted to all of the below to > +gather sufficient attention. The list in alphabetical order: > + > + GNOME > + (contact missing) For GNOME Shell: gnome-shell-l...@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list requires subscription to avoid moderation queue > + > + GTK+ toolkit > + (contact missing) For GTK: gtk-devel-l...@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list requires subscription to avoid moderation queue Ciao, Emmanuele. -- https://www.bassi.io [@] ebassi [@gmail.com] _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list xdg@lists.freedesktop.org https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg