Development quotes of the week

These are the main advantages of the Wayland design principles: Desktop environments can develop more freely, applications are more widely fitting in, and overall policy is where it is (should be) the easiest for an end user to customise: in the display server. All in all, more power to the window manager (a part of the display server a.k.a compositor), which unfortunately also means less power to the application developers to decide on the behaviour. The idea is that the window manager is in the best position to implement window management behaviour the end user wants. End users can pick and choose their DE, and they can tune its window management behaviour. Application developers can avoid worrying about it, and applications avoid imposing window management behaviour that might not always be wanted.

The disadvantage is that the design principles carry a revolutionary idea. Roughly nothing worked like this before Wayland. Porting to Wayland requires re-designing applications to stop explicitly managing their windows, and toolkits have it even worse. I'm sure there are still many use cases that just don't work yet, because there is no protocol extension to deliver a suitable description.

For example, suppose you're lucky enough to be a committer. Every time you commit one of your own patches, you're at serious risk of having to drop everything and put a ton of work into fixing everything you did wrong, either as soon as you do the commit, or when the problems are found later, or both. Every time you commit one of somebody else's patches, you're at risk of having to do the same thing, which means you're probably going to be reluctant to commit anything unless you're pretty sure it's pretty good. That means that committing other people's patches is not primarily about the time it takes to type git commit and git push, but about all of the review you do beforehand, and the potential unfunded liability of having to be responsible for it afterward. I haven't talked to other committers about the extent to which this weighs on their decision-making process, but I'd be astonished if it didn't.

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