Wayland & Weston Saw Fewer Commits In 2014

Going along with yesterday's X.Org Server Saw More Code In 2014 Than 2013, But Its Heydays Are Over article looking at X.Org development statistics for 2014, here's a look at the Wayland's development for last year.

2014 saw the releases of Wayland 1.6 and Wayland 1.5 with the many improvements it brought to core Wayland along with the Weston reference compositor.

In the second half of 2014 was when Wayland founder Kristian Høgsberg began distancing himself from the Wayland project while continuing to be employed by Intel and most recently working on the Skylake Mesa code. Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has basically been serving as the release manager for Wayland/Weston.

In looking at the Git statistics for Wayland, the numbers aren't too bright:

Wayland in 2014 saw 204 commits, which is the lowest point since 2010. Of the 20114 commits, there were 5600 insertions and 1435 deletions. In 2013 were 219 commits with 8342 insertions and 6165 deletions. In 2011 and 2012 when Wayland was still materializing, there were more than ten thousand lines changed each year.

With Kristian stepping away, among the top developers in 2014 were Bill Spitzak, kabeer khan, Marek Chalupa, Peter Hutterer, Jasper St. Pierre, and others. The number of authors each month in 2014 varied between two and ten.

Wayland proper is just under 25k lines of code now -- at the time of writing, it was at 24,964 lines of code and comprised of 104 files.

The lower numbers just aren't due to Wayland stabilizing, but the Weston reference compositor where lots of experimenting happens saw a sharply lower 2014.

Weston in 2014 saw just 634 commits compared to 1107 in 2013 or 1503 in 2012. Over the course of the 634 commits, 29k insertions and 11k deletions happened -- also much lower than in 2013 with +64k and -35k.

After May, Kristian dropped off as one of the leading Weston developers with Nobuhiko Tanibata, Derek Foreman, and Pekka Paalanen being among the dozen or so developers contributing to Weston each month.

Weston broke 100k lines of code in 2014 and ended the year at 102,382 lines of code spread around 208 files.

The slower Wayland/Weston development could be partially justified at least by the protocol beginning to stabilize and have the necessary functionality needed to support the Linux desktop. There's also a lot of related development happening outside of Wayland/Weston proper such as to GNOME's Mutter, other desktop compositors, libinput, Pixman, DRM and Mesa, etc. At this point though only time will tell whether 2015 is finally the year of the Wayland Linux desktop with at least one major tier-one Linux distribution shipping it enabled by default... It could quite possibly be Fedora, but we'll see. Let us know what you think in the forums.