Awesome as a wayland compositor

[d***@chaosreigns.com]

It seems the graphics infrastructure in Linux moves slowly to Wayland. I like
Awesome and want to stay with Awesome when Wayland will be here.

This is just as likely as awesome being ported to MS Windows[1]. Technically, it
should be about equally difficult (= impossible).
Awesome is a X11 window manager. Without X11, there is no place for a X11 window
manager.

There is a common misconception that Wayland is a display server that does
not use window managers. On the contrary, it is a protocol for window
managers to become display servers. So existing X window managers are
precisely what is expected to be used with Wayland - just without X in
the way.

But maybe that wasn't your concern. Maybe your concern was having to
handle EGL, KMS, and evdev directly, because you didn't know that the
creator of Wayland said this, on Jan 31 2011:

<krh> I thin the sample compositor could live on as a simple core
compositor with a pluging architecture
<krh> *think
<krh> and then that would be the answer when people want to run
awesome or openbox or such with wayland: write a plugin to implement
that behaviour in the sample compositor
<Darxus> krh: Awesome and openbox being examples of non-compositing
window managers?
<bnf> Darxus: yes
<krh> Darxus: it was more an example of standalone window managers
without and entire desktop environment
<krh> s/and/an
<krh> so in general, to answer the question of "how will my
favourite, stand-alone window manager work with wayland"
<krh> to say that they have to bring up egl on kms and read input
from evdev is a bit harsh
<krh> and one path forward there could be to define a pluing
architecture for the sample compositor that will allow those cases
to carry over their unique behaviour without all that low-level
bring up
<krh> it's very hand-wavey at this point


I don't think there has been much talk of that plugin architecture since,
but then nothing related to Wayland is really complete. Go ask about it,
and maybe start implementing it.

[d***@chaosreigns.com]

Post by d***@chaosreigns.com
I don't think there has been much talk of that plugin architecture since,

I was wrong, the existing reference implementation uses it:

09:58AM < MeanEYE> Are there plans for plugin support? More specific question would be: is it possible to port tiling window managers to use Wayland?
...
10:03AM < krh> or a plugin to weston
10:03AM < krh> shell.c is the DE for weston
10:04AM < soreau> krh: So its possible weston could be the server and let a plugin be the wm?
10:04AM < krh> soreau: that how it works now, there's just only shell.c