Wayland's Weston Now Working On Libweston-Desktop

Wayland developers continue working on Libweston, which is aiming to make more of the Weston reference compositor reusable by other Wayland compositors. This library offers much of the boilerplate code around the Wayland protocols to allow more sharing by compositors and making it more straight-forward to get things up and running. The latest component is Libweston-desktop.

The initial patches were published today for libweston-desktop, the Weston library focused around desktop functions.

Quentin Glidic who has been working on libweston-desktop explained, "the main goal of libweston-desktop is to abstract shell protocols details from the actual window management. Therefore, it should handle all the things that the spec describes and hide some of them from the compositor, like popup positioning. In other words, only toplevel surfaces are exposed to the compositor, and their state is also taken care of internally, so the compositor only has to provide a few event handlers and use a few getters to manage these surfaces."

The goals of libweston-desktop are to make it easier to bring-up compositors and also to make it easier to support future versions of XDG_Shell.

Those wanting to learn more about this early work on libweston-desktop can read this mailing list patch series.