[RFC] Wayland driver development update

[Alexandre Julliard]

Alexandros Frantzis <alexandros.frantzis at collabora.com> writes:

> On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 10:55:20AM -0600, Zebediah Figura (she/her) wrote:
>> Hello Alexandros,
>
> Hello Zebediah,
>
> Thank you very much for your response!
>
>> 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:
>
> Alexandre (Cc-ed and hi!), it would be great if we could get some input
> about your views on the upstream inclusion of a Wayland driver.

I'm not opposed in principle to having a Wayland driver upstream. In
fact I started writing one myself many years ago... It got stalled when
I realized there was essentially no way to do decent window management,
and that the best we could do would be the equivalent of X11 desktop
mode, where we manage the windows ourselves. I don't have the impression
that the situation has improved in the meantime, or that there is any
interest in improving it.

That doesn't mean it couldn't go upstream, but then there will be
constraints on what hacks and workarounds you'll be able to do. For
instance, it will have to stick to protocols that are standardized
across desktops, without adding compositor-specific workarounds, just
like we don't allow window manager specific hacks on the X11 side
otherwise it quickly becomes unmaintainable.

> This growth in adoption of Wayland as the default choice, coupled with
> the significant reduction of development activity and thus the lack of
> new features on X11/XWayland (e.g. HDR), means that a lot of people are
> going to use Wine on Wayland-based desktops. I believe it would be in
> the best interest of both Wine and Wayland to work on providing the best
> experience possible by using a direct driver, instead of forcing users
> to go through the impedance-mismatch layer of XWayland.

I expect you'll find a much bigger impedance mismatch between Wayland
and Win32, and that in the end you'll end up reinventing XWayland using
Windows APIs. But if that's your idea of fun go ahead ;-)

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.org