sounds great! I hope this gets some traction, because the official wayland protocols are so dead slow that its not even funny anymore. for example the wayland hdr protocol, open for 4 years now: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/14
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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Yay, another set of protocols that will just lead to more and more fragmentation.
You do acknowledge one issue with Wayland, probably the biggest issue with Wayland, but then fail to acknowledge the second biggest issue with Wayland being fragmentation.
Solve one issue by making another issue worse.
Wayland's approach has always been to make 3rd party protocols easier to opt in and out of. Sway and Hyprland both used custom protocols whilst official solutions were being designed iirc. Nothing stopping anyone from switching from one protocol to another if they implement the same thing down the line.
At least this way, compositors may be able to use something like frog as a shared "experimental branch" which can be enabled for users who need them, but otherwise disabled whilst Wayland core isn't pressured to work faster.
It's up to Wayland to make these projects obsolete if it causes them or users a problem.
that's just the thing, This is again, more fragmentation, Some compositors support always on top, some don't, you choose x protocol for your app, and now your app works great on sway, but not on KDE or gnome, or it works great on gnome and not kde or sway etc. As an app developer the situation is a bloody joke. My current stance is "just use xwayland because wayland will never be suitable" and thankfully with cosmic and kde both supporting "don't scale xwayland" this seems to work well.
EDIT: they also make enough deviances from the upstream protocols that this can't really be considered a "experimental branch"
EX: https://github.com/misyltoad/frog-protocols/blob/main/frog-protocols/frog-color-management-v1.xml vs https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/14/diffs
You either come up with something like frog-protocols to try and actually get things done, or you can wait for Wayland devs to endlessly bikeshed. Getting some amount of harmless fragmentation on an open source project seems much better than waiting 4 years (and counting) for them to start actually working on implementing HDR.
I'm ignorant about display servers. Should applications be ported from a Wayland compositor to another Wayland compositor that has a different "protocol extension" ?
I can't help but feel that they like Wayland the way it is, seeing as it's certainly not changed course
this is pretty much how it works in some cases, you need to port from one protocol to another, or to a different system altogether.
I like the approach here, but the requirements are a little vague and prone to bikeshedding. Stuff like "could this be used by multiple clients" might mean a protocol is held in limbo whilst it's given extra scope for example.
It'll need some strong moderation which might rub people the wrong way, but if this keeps Wayland's cutting edge moving whilst the official solutions are found, I'm all for it.
Basically the Matrix Spec Change Proposal system, I like it. Opens the floor to more players, gives tool authors a list of protocols they could choose to build on, and hopefully compositors will choose to adopt or adapt one of these protocols before writing their own.