From: Jude Nelson [mailto:jud...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, March 23, 2015 3:50 PM To: T.J. Duchene Cc: dng@lists.dyne.org Subject: Re: [Dng] FW: Devuan commitments - will trade-off be applied? Technically, Wayland is the protocol definition, not the implementation (i.e. think X11 vs X.org). Weston is the reference implementation. [T.J. ] Good point. I was using the term Wayland more or less generically. Yes, I know, but thank you for the correction. Hopefully, it will be less confusing. While it is true that most of the Wayland/Weston developers are also X.org developers (and most come from Linux), they are making all the right moves to avoid lock-in to Linux or a particular Wayland implementation. For example, while there are multiple Wayland implementations (i.e. a Wayland window manager or widget toolkit is effectively a Wayland protocol implementation), inconsistencies between an implementation and the specification are treated as bugs in the implementation. As another example, Wayland avoids relying on FreeDesktop technologies like dbus and systemd. [T.J. ] Also correct. You may be interested to know that the Wayland protocol is not tied to a particular rendering technology or paradigm. To use the OSI analogy, Wayland lives in the presentation layer--it's concerned with helping applications identify and interact with the host's output devices, input devices, and pixel memory buffers (on both an individual level and by groupings). The protocol itself is not concerned with users, sessions, or GPU infrastructure, nor is it concerned with widget sets, windowing, decorations, etc. [T.J. ] Yes, I know. While I am not commenting as to their ultimate aims, which OVERALL are actually quite admirable and agnostic, it is still less than desirable that a key technology: KMS IS part of the initial implementation, which in turn becomes the "reference implementation" for all practical purposes. KMS as a software is Linux specific. While there are equivalents out there, they are certainly less developed. When I criticize Wayland, it is over concern that Linux-isms have worked their way into the final version of the stack, making it less portable to systems not using Linux KMS. I think you can agree that that concern is not entirely unjustified, given that a number of supposedly platform agnostic software projects have Linux peculiarities in their code that make them difficult to port to other UNIXes. I freely admit that until we see the final version of Wayland, it is hard to judge if it is merely overcaution. T.J.
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