[CarelessExpert]

> You're also talking as if Pipewire is some outside thing that was developed in reaction to Wayland, when as far as I know, the plan with those implementations was always to delegate some tasks to Pipewire.

Given that Wayland was first released in 2008 and the first commit to the PipeWire project was in 2015, I'm quite confident at this point that you're rewriting history to support your position.

[taway098123]

You misunderstand, it was only Weston that was started in 2008, and it had screenshots back then. I'm talking about those other implementations, they didn't really stabilize and start aiming to have feature parity until a few years ago, and they decided not to copy Weston's screenshooting mechanism.

[CarelessExpert]

Weston being the reference implementation for the protocol, my point stands and you're now picking nits.

[taway098123]

I don't see how I am, and I don't understand your point. The reference implementation had screenshots. The other implementors decided not to copy that and did their own thing. What more could the Weston developers have done? They can't force the other implementations to write code that they weren't interested in writing.

[CarelessExpert]

Actually standardize the protocol and make the feature part of the spec instead of delegating the implementation to compositor extensions and effectively giving everyone permissions to do their own thing.

As they should've done with the many other features that are missing from the base protocol because some designer somewhere decided it was "beyond the scope of the project".

We even have a pattern for this in the way HTML5 was developed.

I swear, it's like the Wayland folks were absolutely hell-bent on repeating the mistakes of the browser world circa 2000. The only question, now, is which project will end up the IE5 of the Wayland compositor world...

[taway098123]

Any implementor always has permission to do their own thing, that's the point of making a second implementation. Putting something in a spec somewhere doesn't make it mandatory or guarantee it will be implemented. They could have put the weston screenshoot protocol that was created in 2008 in the spec, but they didn't do it, probably because the other implementors said it wasn't good enough and they didn't want to implement it. So what more could they have done? The mailing lists around that time had a lot of suggestions that went nowhere. Trying to put pressure on open source developers to implement something they don't want to do doesn't work, unless you are their boss paying them a salary.

I'm being serious here, I legitimately don't understand what you're pointing out. Yeah I too wish everything I was planning on 13 years ago turned out perfectly, things don't work like that though. And if you ask me, the thing that's most comparable to IE5 is the Xorg server.

[CarelessExpert]

> Putting something in a spec somewhere doesn't make it mandatory or guarantee it will be implemented. They could have put the weston screenshoot protocol that was created in 2008 in the spec, but they didn't do it, probably because the other implementors said it wasn't good enough and they didn't want to implement it.

Amazing how nothing is ever the fault of the people leading the Wayland project.

> Any implementor always has permission to do their own thing, that's the point of making a second implementation. Putting something in a spec somewhere doesn't make it mandatory or guarantee it will be implemented.

Ahh, now I've got it!

So what you're saying is that, in essence, since your claim is no one follows it, one must conclude that in fact there is no spec!

And given that everyone I've come across who's involved with Wayland has said "Wayland is just a protocol", and given protocols are defined by specs, if the spec doesn't exist, then neither does Wayland!

Neo would be proud.

> I'm being serious here, I legitimately don't understand what you're pointing out.

I can't think of anything that more succinctly describes what's wrong with how Wayland has been developed over the last 13 years.

Well, except there is no spec, so I guess nothing was developed at all? I dunno...

[hakfoo]

One of the major complaints thrown at X11 in the 90s and early 00s was the inconsistent mismatch of UI conventions and behaviours. GNOME and KDE were still at interesting-novelty status, you had OpenLook and Motif apps on the distribution CD with distinctive styles, and every so often you'd load a libXaw program where all the scrollbars were weird and you suddenly used the right mouse button in strange and exotic ways.

How did they manage to get through the project without addressing this point, and make it even worse, by offloading stuff like "screenshots" that was taken as a given to the nonstandardized compositor layer?

I'd also have wanted to see much more of a "one true widget library"-- so Wayland!GTK or Wayland!Qt are just thin wrappers on top, which would ensure you get any native theming or customizability/accessibility tweaks cross all your software for free.