Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 14, 2012 22:46 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Wayland - Beyond X (The H) by rqosa
Parent article: Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

In principle, you could indeed rewrite the existing X server to provide a suitable interface to plug a compositor in, much like Wayland. But if you look at the X.org codebase, you realise that it's a complete mess, despite all the cleanup work that's been done, and that this is a harder task than the way round that Wayland has done it (where X becomes just another client of a Wayland system).

The people doing this aren't complete idiots - they're the people who are keeping X11 going today. They're hitting the pain points of the current codebase, and Wayland began as an experiment to see if they could do something useful with the parts they already have, without a long silent period where they're simply refactoring all the cruft out of the existing X server codebase. Turns out, the answer's yes - it could just as easily have been "no, not interesting unless you refactor X.org".