F21 System Wide Change: Wayland

[Jaroslav Reznik]

= Proposed System Wide Change:  Wayland = 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Wayland

Change owner(s): Matthias Clasen and the desktop team <mclasen at redhat.com, 
desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org>

Port the GNOME desktop to Wayland. 

== Detailed Description ==
GNOME is being ported to Wayland. In particular GNOME shell is changed to run 
as a Wayland compositor instead of an X11 compositor. Other components of 
GNOME that currently talk directly to the X server, such as gnome-settings-
daemon or gnome-control-center, will be ported to corresponding Wayland 
interfaces. Many GTK+ applications will just work, using the existing Wayland 
backend. Applications that make use of X-specific APIs will be supported with 
the xwayland X server, which is started on demand. gdm will be changed to 
support both Wayland-based sessions and X-based sessions.

This change is targeted at F21. For F20, we aim for having an experimental 
GNOME shell Wayland compositor available, without necessarily having all the 
surrounding desktop infrastructure ported. To avoid destabilizing the X 
compositor, mutter will ship two separate libraries, and gnome-shell will ship 
two binaries that will link against them. Concretely, we plan to have a 
separate mutter-wayland package.

For more details, see this page [1].

== Scope ==
* Proposal owners:
** Port GNOME shell to be a Wayland compositor
** Implement Wayland equivalents for X11 APIs such as XRANDR, XI2 and 
accessibility features
** Port gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-control-center, gnome-desktop from X11 
APIs to Wayland equivalents
** Enable gdm to launch Wayland sessions
** Complete the GTK+ Wayland backend to be on par with the X11 backend
** Package mutter-wayland as a separate package review [2] (DONE)

* Other developers:
** The X team needs to improve xwayland to be good enough for all X11 
application - in practice this means we need X 1.16
** The X team needs to cooperate with us in reimplementing some X11 APIs
** The X team needs to package libevdev (DONE)
** The X team needs to package libinput (DONE)
** It is not necessary for all spins or all desktop environments in Fedora to 
switch to Wayland at the same time (or ever)

* Release engineering:
** No tasks anticipated

* Policies and guidelines: 
** Once we have a basic Wayland-based GNOME session, it would be good to 
encourage testers and packagers to test their applications under Wayland
** For applications that are known not to work under Wayland, we will need 
guidelines for how to ensure that they will transparently run under xwayland

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointNine/Features/WaylandSupport 
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1007445
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