"Wayland" support of awesome

[zaxebo1]

As X will be discarded in a short time by Fedora and Ubuntu etc. GNOME, KDE etc are being directly compatible with Wayland (or Mir ). Even with e19 release the enlightment window manager also directly supports wayland.
Is there any plan /roadmap for awesome for porting to wayland

[Elv13]

X wont be discarded for at least 15 years. It will be supported as an alternate protocol in Wayland and Mir just as it is on OS X.

Awesome doesn't have the heavy handed abstraction layers some other WM may have. It is a lean XCB based WM. The Awesome core probably cannot be extended to support Wayland (let alone Mir). A rewrite is AFAIK the only viable option. The lua layer could probably be re-used with some changes. There is currently no plan to do that.

Wayland support is going to happen. We built those abstractions,

[actionless]

talking about rewriting -- can it be just a lua wrapper for an already existing library like https://github.com/Cloudef/wlc or https://github.com/michaelforney/swc ?

[Elv13]

MayTODO:
[ ] Pixman backend
[ ] FB backend
[ ] Wayland backend

The FB and PixMap backends would be quite useful, one less layer of abstraction. I guess it will stay a "wait and see" approach for some time (and well, patches welcome).

[zaxebo1]

@Elv13
you are right that X will not discarded in that sense. But once wayland becomes mainstream, then the X apps will run on X; and that X will itself run on XWayland , which will then run on Wayland.

HENCE, X which was running directly on machine, will then run on top of wayland (using XWayland).
So, awesomeWM which prides in fast execution , will become inefficient as "awesomeWM->X->XWayland->Wayland" when compared" with itself as the situation today is just "awesomeWM->X".
This four layer situation ( "awesomeWM->X->XWayland->Wayland" ) may or may not make it a CPU hog, but it will definitely make it a laptop battery draining hog compared to today's situation :-(

[zaxebo1]

we can not avoid wayland issue, one way or other - it is going to meet us very soon:

Fedora 20 with Wayland preview (post of year 2013)
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=fedora20_wayland_preview&num=1

roadmap of Wayland and Fedora (post of year 2013)
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-March/180546.html

Fedora 22 even more emphasis on Wayland (post of year 2015)
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-Workstation-22-Features

[Elv13]

"patches" welcome

[zaxebo1]

okk :-)

[ff2000]

AFAIK XWayland is only used when running a legacy X application in a wayland powered environment. So for asesome nothing will change: it will just run directly on X as it did before, no XWayland involved.

[zaxebo1]

@ff2000 : as of now Awesome window manager uses XCB (X protocol C-language binding), which is client of X11 display server protocol.
==> So yes, awesomeWM is X application
===>So, awesomeWM is a legacy X application in wayland powrred environment
===>So, Xwayland will be involved

[ff2000]

Awesome is a special application - it's a window manager, so it IS the "environment". wayland is used in the compositor, but awesome DOES NOT composite. For compositing you need special applications like compton (and AFAIK they also don't have a wayland roadmap). It is the WM/compositor who decides if it can run wayland or not. And as long as the login manager is not entirely stupid it won't force wayland on legacy X sessions.
XWayland is something the compositor has to deal with - run X applications in an embedded X server.

In short: I really don't see a reason that you should be worried about performance issues because awesome won't run inside XWayland.

[aignas]

Just a thought... would it be possible to use the upcoming libweston, which from what I understand could be used as a compositing library?

[Elv13]

Code is code, so I guess with unlimited effort and respect for the laws of physics and economics, everything is possible. It would still take monumental effort and a full rewrite of the C code.

[kierun]

+1 for Wayland support. I would hate to go look for another WM. I can offer some time to test and report bugs if that helps. I'd offer time to code as well but having twins, I have no time to even sleep.

[zaxebo1]

I'd offer time to code as well but having twins, I have no time to even sleep.

Ha. I can really empathise with you :-D