I mean, no, it's not the fault of Weston developers that other implementors decided do their own thing. I asked this before but what could they have done? Putting tons and tons of things in the spec wouldn't really have fixed the real problem, which is that the way they wanted things didn't exist at that time, and the only way forward for them was to write their own implementation. The spec is only meaningful if you can get other people to promise to implement it in the way it's supposed to be implemented. It's true that Wayland is just a protocol but that protocol is also defined significantly by its implementations.>I can't think of anything that more succinctly illustrates what's wrong with how Wayland has been developed over the last 13 years.
I don't understand why and I wish you wouldn't do this, this is leaning into flame war territory. If you can explain your point to me in a way I understand, then I'm ready to listen.
CarelessExpert|4 years ago
The entire point of a spec is to help drive interoperable implementations. If that's not the goal, then it has no purpose and it might as well not exist.
The core of Wayland is supposedly a standardized protocol and these various projects seemed to do just fine implementing against that core spec. There's a reason I can run a Qt Wayland app on Mutter or vice versa.
Evolution and development of that spec can be done in a collaborative way that takes into account the various needs of those projects, such that the standard can evolve in a way that furthers the whole ecosystem.
That the Wayland folks instead throw up their hands and just say "write a compositor extension" demonstrates their unwillingness to do the actual hard work of building an ecosystem, which is creating consensus and driving adoption of common features.
Is this hard?
Yes.
What they are doing is hard, and it's deeply naive bordering on irresponsible to engage in a project of rebuilding the entire display server ecosystem without recognizing the need for coordination and diplomacy across the open source world.
I look at the history of this and all I can think is that this is a group of people who have failed to learn the lessons of the past. Groups like the X11 and HTML5 standards bodies, the IETF, and so many more have demonstrated how to build a consensus-oriented specification that enables and encourages interoperability. Yet, to hear you speak of this, that must be a figment of my imagination because apparently that's impossible.
taway098123|4 years ago
If you ask me, people only notice the ones where it takes a while to reach agreement. Just look at the PR we're commenting on, it took nvidia several years to come around and implement dma-bufs. Sucks but it happens. No one ever seems to pay attention to all the other areas over the years where there was consensus.
johnday|4 years ago
A protocol should never, never, ever be defined in any way by its implementations. The entire purpose of a protocol is to abstract away the common interface such that it is entirely implementation-agnostic.
Indeed, you might say that a protocol prescribes exactly the intersection of all implementations.
taway098123|4 years ago
That's a better way to put it and that's more what I was getting at.