wayland in rawhide

[Christian Schaller]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Josh Boyer" <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org>
> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2015 8:05:27 PM
> Subject: Re: wayland in rawhide
> 
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 7:58 PM, David Airlie <airlied at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> >> That's fine.  I don't have a problem adding "GNOME on Xorg" option to
> >> the session
> >> menu in the interim. I'll do it tomorrow.
> >
> > This is what the feature page said would happen in the first place. So
> > I'm also confused why you didn't just do that.
> >
> >>
> >> I will say you're coming off (to me anyway) as somewhat combative.  We're
> >> on
> >> the same team here.  Let's keep it constructive and friendly?
> >
> > Okay, I'll try and be a little less pissed off at disabling features users
> > use, that we've spent years implementing in X/GNOME.
> >
> > The fact you are requesting wayland by default while we still have the
> > following list:
> >
> > Close all remaining feature parity gaps between the Wayland and the X11
> > session:
> >
> >     input methods
> >     on-screen keyboard
> >     hi-dpi support
> >     clipboard proxy for xwayland
> >     attached modal dialogs
> >     tablet support
> >     startup notification
> >     touch proxy for xwayland
> >     accessibility features
> >     output rotation
> >
> > These are just the missing features (never mind dialog boxes in wierd
> > places bugs)
> > and it doesn't even contain the USB output hotplugging, or secondary GPU
> > output use cases.
> >
> > So maybe I'm getting old, but I thought we were over shoving half-baked
> > onto users now,
> > Maybe implement all those features, get them into the non-default wayland
> > session,
> > then go lobby for enabling the wayland session by default, otherwise I feel
> > you are
> > putting the cart before the horse.
> 
> Is the concern mostly about switching to it by default and then
> somehow users won't know how to switch back to X to get their missing
> features?
> 
> I'll admit that given some of the target audience we've pushed for
> where they expect things to "just work", that might be a valid
> concern.  If they log into an F24 Gnome session and the above things
> don't work, they won't view it as "oh Wayland."   They'll view it as
> "oh, regression" and likely not look at "X/Gnome" as a choice to fix
> all of it.
> 
> There is definitely a degree of lower-level understanding required to
> get back to a "normal" state in that case.  And it isn't like people
> are going to use many of those features in GDM heavily enough that
> they'd edit the conf file to switch GDM itself to X.
> 
> I have no idea if it's possible to detect usage of the above features
> in existing installs and not default to Wayland in that case.  Or if
> it's possible to switch to X if a user turns on one of the features on
> a new install.

We do expect to get all of these resolved during the Fedora 23 lifecycle,
the reason we are switching Rawhide is to push more people to get involved
with finding and fixing the issues we do not know about yet. This is a major change for us as a project and we need to take collective ownership of it,
if we expect to be able to sit back and let a few dedicated people pull the 
load alone here we are setting ourselves up for failure.

And let it be clearly said if we do not get these items resolved in time for Fedora 24 we will not switch to Wayland as default in Fedora 24. 

There are some items, like binary driver support, that are not likely to be resolved for Fedora 24, but for those the automatic X fallback should kick 
inn.

Christian