Plan to organize the Wayland-by-default effort
We are working toward enabling the GNOME desktop on Wayland as the
default for the Fedora Workstation project. The question is: What
features do we have to complete in order to make this switch? Everyone
seems to have their own ideas of what is required, and a systematic
approach is needed to organize the effort.
Over the years, many features have been developed for the traditional
X11-based GNOME desktop, and we are bringing these features over to the
Wayland-based version. Quite a few of these features have already been
implemented for the Wayland-based desktop and we already have highly
functional desktop experience that everyone can use, but it is not yet
complete. In order for us to enable it by default we need to both
implement the missing features and fix the bugs in features that are
already complete.
For the bugs, we simply need to fix them. However, the situation with
features is more complex. We each have our own list of features that we
believe need to be implemented, but we lack a complete list of all the
missing features and a clear way to determine when we have implemented
enough of them to enable the Wayland-based GNOME desktop by default.
Toward that goal, we are consolidating all of the various feature lists
in the following Fedora wiki page:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wayland_features
We are putting this on the Fedora wiki (instead of a GNOME, Wayland,
kernel, Freedesktop or other wiki) since this is a Fedora decision on
when we feel the Wayland-based GNOME desktop is ready to be the default
for our Fedora Workstation project.
The initial step is to list all features for the Wayland-based GNOME
desktop. Olivier Fourdan, who has been heavily involved in the upstream
Wayland development and also involved in GNOME development activities,
has agreed to maintain this page. If you have ideas for what features
should be included, please add them to the wiki page and discuss them on
this list.
What we need for each missing or incomplete feature is a descriptive
name and what stage of development it is in. Links to other pages where
more detailed description of the feature status and implementation
details are also welcomed. For the development stages, there are
kernel, supporting libraries, Wayland protocol, XWayland, mutter, gtk+
and application levels. For example, tablet support is currently
implemented in the kernel and supporting libraries. The protocol has
been proposed and is under discussion. Once the protocol has been
accepted, there will be additional development needed at higher levels.
This feature will remain on the list until it is complete at all levels.
The next step is determining which of these features must be implemented
before we can enable Wayland by default in Fedora Workstation. The plan
is to form a small group of people deeply involved in the Wayland, GNOME
and/or Fedora development to prioritize the list of features and then
draw a line in this prioritized list above which all features must be
complete before we will enable the GNOME desktop on Wayland by default
in our Fedora Workstation project. We can then evaluate this list
during the Fedora 24 development cycle to determine if we are ready to
enable Wayland by default in the alpha, beta and final releases.