Intel, Red Hat Working On Enabling Wayland Support In GNOME 168
sfcrazy writes "After shooting down Canonical's Mir, Intel and Red Hat teams have increased collaboration on the development of Wayland. Developers at Intel and Red Hat are working together to 'merge and stabilize the patches to enable Wayland support in GNOME,' as Christian Schaller writes on his blog. The teams are also looking into improving the stack further. Weston won't be used anymore, so GNOME Shell will become the Wayland compositor. It must be noted that Canonical earlier committed to supporting and embracing Wayland. Despite that promise, the company silently stopped contribution, and it was later learned that they were secretly working on their own display server, Mir. Intel's management recently rejected patches for Mir, leaving its maintainance to Canonical. Before Intel's rejection, GNOME and KDE also refused to adopt Mir. Intel's message is clear to Canonical: if you promise to contribute, then do so."
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
The code base is old and hard to work with from what I've heard from the X hackers. It has reached a point where it might make sense to start over.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Additionally, X11 does a lot of things that have been taken over by toolkits. GTK and Qt don't even use X11's drawing and font facilities anymore, they handle it themselves and then dump a buffer for Xorg to display.
Re:More petty bickering (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, Wayland really was not coming fast enough. I follow the Wayland developer mailing list, and it is apparent Mir seems to have kicked the Wayland developers in the butt and gotten them back to work. And they did fix some mistakes, in particular they realized that the server has to do event handling so that input methods work, rather than the previous idea that clients would have to interpret raw device events. I think they also fixed the other complaint Mir had which was the method to allocate window image buffers could not work with Android drivers, though this area is very confusing and it is not clear if it was a problem and/or whether it is fixed now.
Re:The real agenda? (Score:5, Informative)
Canonical bashing might be all the rage at the moment, but I can see how they are feeling a bit hard done by with all these accusations that they should have used subsequent products instead of the ones they wrote first.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
no, no I dont.
Read what I said again.
In the real world, the network transparency support features are not used, EVEN WHEN YOU ARE USING A REMOTE DISPLAY because it's easier and more effective to actually render on the remote machine and bang the interface, so that's exactly what every widget toolkit does.
Re:The real agenda? (Score:5, Informative)
Upstart was written before systemd started; Fedora and RHEL used Upstart for a while. Newer, better has come along.
Unity was a quick response to Gnome Shell, which was available as a functional pre-release in 2009 3 months before Unity. Gnome Shell was up-and-coming and Canonical headed it off. The big move to Unity was highly politicized as "Oh no! Gnome is changing! People hate that! They will be angry at the new Gnome interface! ... Unity!!!!" It was integrated into the distribution as the primary desktop environment one release prior to integration of Gnome Shell, when Gnome Shell was already released and stable.
Mir came about well into the Wayland development cycle, citing "Wayland is coming too slowly. And we don't like it."
Bzr is the third generation of a number of unrelated pieces of software. The original Bzr, now renamed Bazaar, was a slow bloated piece of shit that didn't work right at all. The current Bzr started pretty bad, and has been improved; it was easily surpassed by Git at one point, but had caught up. There was also Mercurial and darcs, but that's not really of much import. The reason Bzr isn't more popular isn't that it's not great; it's that Git was better way before Bzr was usable.
Launchpad took forever to become open source, but that's not really a huge issue. It's sensible, but it is on their laundry list of stuff they've written that's not the same as everything that was already out there. To be fair, all other stuff out there sucks; I'd like to have Launchpad with Git integration (it'll import a Git repo by converting it to Bzr, rather than actually integrating with Git), or something like Gitlab but in Python instead of Ruby (running Ruby apps is really fucking hard; it's like the old days of wild wild Java west when nothing worked unless you were a Dark Invoker, and even then only one app per server... look up RVM and such to get an idea).
Re:More petty bickering (Score:5, Informative)
It's obviously a bottleneck and this is why Linux devs (including many noted X developers) are keen to get rid of it.
I'm sure it will take Wayland a while to find its feet and for dists to transition fully but when it does Linux will be better for it. Doesn't stop people running X either - it'll just be over Wayland and probably not noticeably different either.