[RFC] Wayland driver development update

[Zebediah Figura (she/her)]

Hello Alexandros,

On 2/19/21 9:16 AM, Alexandros Frantzis wrote:
> In previous discussions there were some concerns about accepting the
> Wayland driver into staging, unless there was more confidence that it
> would eventually be accepted upstream. What's the best way to get an
> answer to this question of (eventual) upstream acceptance? Even in this
> somewhat experimental state the driver is viable for many use cases.
> What would be required to drive this effort forward on the path to
> staging and, later, upstream inclusion?

Having a positive answer from Alexandre (viz. that a Wayland driver is 
desirable) is one thing, and would be necessary for me to agree to 
maintain the driver, but I'd also like to see the following before 
accepting anything into wine-staging:

* The driver should be at least as feature-complete as the X11 driver. 
Ideally, it should be *more* feature-complete. That includes not just 
support at the protocol level, but actual implemented support across all 
major window managers. There's no point accepting the driver into 
wine-staging if it's not enabled by default, and I want to deal with as 
few bug reports as I possibly can. This also helps prove that the driver 
is not a bad idea.

* A promise from the developers to respond promptly to all bug reports 
concerning window management (provided, I guess, that the same bug 
reports don't occur with the X11 driver).

* A promise from the developers to deal with any difficult rebase work. 
Rebasing is normally our responsibility as wine-staging maintainers, but 
for large and difficult patch sets we do request that the author be on 
hand to maintain their own work.

* A promise from the developers to try to upstream the driver after it 
is introduced into wine-staging. I will *not* be upstreaming the driver 
myself, and I do *not* intend to maintain it forever. Please do not 
treat wine-staging as an end goal in itself—it is a testing ground and 
nothing more.

Even with all that, I'm not thrilled about the driver. I recognize I may 
not have a choice in the matter, and I recognize I'm not an X11 
developer and thus lack significant context, but I don't like the way a 
feature-incomplete protocol has been forcibly pushed on applications 
with the apparent intent of quickly replacing and removing its predecessor.

ἔρρωσο,
Zebediah

> 
> Thanks,
> Alexandros