Hi Inhabitant, On Apr 30, 2016, at 1:37 PM, Cestarian Inhabitant <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've been wanting for a while now to get started with developing my > own Wayland Compositor/Window Manager/Shell. And I honestly can't find > much in the way of "how tos" or "getting started with wayland > development" or well, anything.
I am basically in the same boat as you. Short story: make positive contributions to the project. > The only "official" tutorial or educational material seems to be the > weston project. > > The problem with the weston project is that it is HUGE and clunky, it > might be ok as reference materials for someone who is already well > along his way developing a wayland shell but needs some features that > the weston shell has and he doesn't, other than that it is a useless > (and might I add way too poorly commented) material that can never > serve as anyone's starting point unless that someone has an unhealthy > amount of patience. > > This simply won't do. There may be some enthusiast or hobbyist created > smaller compositors (swc), usually very incomplete and often including > buggy features, that people are often trying to use as a starting > point, but all in all it seems like people often either progress very > slow or just give up on developing their wayland compositorss (I mean > it has to speak volumes that the only projects that are seriously > making any sort of progress on the wayland front are Gnome and KDE, > and despite the size of their development teams they are facing major > hurdles (although that may be to be expected for porting such big > projects)) there's also of course the (also slowly progressing) > enlightenment project. These projects are all respected and have > sizable and active development teams beforehand (we aren't seeing many > smaller projects that are perhaps going in a direction similar to > openbox or xmonad succeeding very much, they are there, yes, very > many, yes, but none of them is 1.0, none of them is usage ready) I respectfully disagree on all points above. Have you written and published any significant software, or contributed to large open source projects? I'm not trolling you - I simply encourage you to be more like Gandhi or Bill Murray. :) > None of these are good starting points either, it's not because > they're impossible to learn from, it's more because they weren't > intended that way. > > I believe that this may be holding back the progress of wayland quite > a lot, and slowing down the rate at which people who might want to use > it are transitioning to it from X11, especially on the developer side. > > I would love it if someone would take it upon themselves to build such > an educational project which is meant to serve as a starting point for > developers who want to develop a wayland compositor of their own, or a > wayland compatible application (that may be using it's own GUI > framework (e.g. not Qt or GTK or EFL or SDL...)) Wouldn't it be great? :) I'm personally working on this as I educate myself about this part of the Linux stack. I should have some significant work published by the end of summer 2016. > It would most definitely accelerate the adoption of wayland, increase > wayland projects, and increase the amount of people who may start > doing experimental projects on wayland. > > If no one is up for the task, I personally would be willing to do > this, but I can't because I don't understand wayland at all at this > point. If someone could teach me the knowledge needed to create the > most basic, simple wayland compositor possible (a desktop shell that > can be successfully executed and run from a console, and is capable of > opening windows; it doesn't need to have decorations or anything to > begin with), or at least create and share such code, code that is easy > to understand and well commented with as few lines and few project > files as is realistically possible for such a compositor, I would be > very grateful and after testing and understanding it (playing with it) > I would personally create my own version of such a project along with > tutorial material (guides) to show other people how to get started > from an empty project file to a functional and usable wayland shell. > Hell, I might even make a video tutorial. You'll need to dig. You can ask me questions on IRC, and I think you'll find that the entire community is very professional and helpful. Just be sure to a) be humble (these folks have been working on this for _years_ and b) ask productive, intelligent questions only after you've tried finding the answers on your own (use people's time efficiently). > So please, someone, explain wayland to me. (The ideal programming > languages for this would be either C or C++ (highly compatible, very > widely used and very widely recognized by all programmers), graphical > code can be whatever language (Preferably GLES/EGL for maximum > compatibility, and easier than vulkan as a starting point)) so that I > can explain it to everybody else. > > Am I asking too much? Respectfully, yes. :) We're going to have to do this ourselves. I really want the documentation to be great. Any quality contributions are certainly welcome. yong > Or will somebody help me try to ignite a wave of > wayland development hobbyists so that Linux can again become as > diverse and cool as it used to be back in the day with endless choices > between desktop environments? _______________________________________________ wayland-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel
