Re: A little experiment: GNOME on wayland-only?

Hi!,

On Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 2:14 PM Javier Jardón <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This weekend I was curios about how difficult would be to have GNOME
> in a wayland-only system
>
> Thanks to building GNOME in a sandbox (thanks to buildstream and
> bwrap) and also thanks on using freedesktop-sdk as a base we can
> easily control the whole stack, so I started to experiment [1]
>
> Not sure how far we can go, but at least I'm discovering bugs and
> submitting some patches on the way (some of them are already
> accepted!)
>

If you still want to preserve X11 support, these modules do need to keep
linking to X11 components:
- mutter, so it can spawn Xwayland and serve as a X11 WM
- gnome-settings-daemon, as gsd-xsettings implements the Xsettings manager,
still necessary for X11 clients.
- gtk, as the X11 backend is used by both mutter and gsd-xsettings within a
wayland session

And if you look into misc. components:
- IBus, as it has a XIM implementation relevant to X11 clients
- Pulseaudio, to make ssh -X clients' sound work seamlessly

I do know that from the gnome-shell perspective, everything is paved so
that gdm may use --no-x11, but there's other aspects to it (eg. XDMCP) I'm
not sure can be simply thrown away, or integrated with Xwayland-on-demand.

Beyond that, AFAICT if other regular GNOME session services/apps indirectly
rely on X11 at build/runtime, it's an oversight.

There's been some work lately to have those misc components autostarted
transparently in a better manner for X11 clients, see
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/945 and the other
related MRs. After that there's IMHO little reason to have
xwayland-on-demand turned off by default :).


> At some point I would like to generate a parallel pipeline in
> gnome-build-meta so at least we do not regress on wayland-only support
> (and ideally we can create a parallel GNOME VM without X at all, who
> knowns!)
>

If you want to go that far, there's no support in g-s-d/mutter to build
without X11, should be reasonably easy for g-s-d, but it's still likely to
cause to some #ifdef proliferation in mutter.

Cheers,
  Carlos


>
> I'm keeping the progress here: [1] if someone wants to keep track
>
> Cheers,
> Javier
>
> [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/issues/226
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