Five Things in Fedora This Week (2014-04-01)

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 04/02/2014 04:44 PM, Ian Malone wrote:
> On 2 April 2014 16:04, Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 10:47 AM, Ian Malone  wrote:
>>> 
>>> I originally missed this line in Rahul's email:
>>>> Other apps can use the compatibility layer called XWayland."
>>> 
>>> But did read his reply to Lee:
>>>>> Hm, not really useful when it doesn`t work with existing
>>>>> WMs ...
>>>> That would be the responsibility of the WM's themselves.
>>> 
>>> Which might have been better reiterating the point about the 
>>> compatibility layer.
>> 
>> 
>> Reiterating doesn't help much when people jump to conclusions
>> rather than read through the details which are widely available
>> online but in any case, the compatibility layer is primary
>> designed for running X apps that haven't migrated over but window
>> managers are rather special and tend to use very specific
>> functionality from X rather than rely mostly on abstraction
>> layer via GTK or Qt which themselves can work with Wayland.  So
>> they really should be ported over and that is the responsibility
>> of the WM developers.  You could in theory be running a full
>> desktop environment over the compatibility layer but it isn't a
>> good idea since performance will likely suffer and it isn't
>> designed for that.
>> 
> 
> I would love to spend all my free time reading up about every new 
> project, but it's not going to happen. Sorry typo, "I would loathe 
> to..." Since you and Stephen Gallagher have now said somewhat
> contradictory things I'm left no wiser than when we started. I also
> don't know whether to take the statement about performance at face
> value or whether to imagine it's conjecture, since compatibility
> layers can be quite transparent. (And also since more modern WMs
> incorporate scripting engines we seem to be at the point where we
> say performance limits for WM aren't a worry any more.)
> 

I don't think we said anything contradictory at all. I pointed out
that the Wayland developers are including a compatibility layer called
XWayland that provides a backwards-compatible interface for
applications and window managers that are designed for X-Windows.
Rahul accurately pointed out that the nature of a compatibility
wrapper is such that it would never have the same real-world
performance as a pure implementation (such as x.org) and as such if
window managers (which tend to use far more of the low-level API than
applications do) want ideal performance, it is in their best interest
to port to the new Wayland code instead of relying on the X-Windows
compatibility.
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