Wayland & Weston To See New Releases In Early March

The release plans for the next version of the Weston reference compositor have been firmed up as well as joining that release by a new version of Wayland itself.

Last week longtime Wayland developer Derek Foreman brought up the idea of the next Weston release with a February feature freeze and March release target. With there being others interested in seeing a new release too, he's tentatively planning for the alpha release on 1 February, beta on 15 February, and the release candidate on 1 March. A week or so after that, if the release candidate testing is uneventful, could see the stable releases.

The plan also includes having a new Wayland release too. Wayland and Weston releases are no longer jointly tied, but there's been enough changes there to warrant a new release too.

This next release of Weston has initial Meson build system support as they prepare to phase out Autotools, FreeRDP 2.0 updates in the RDP back-end, potentially seeing XDG-Shell support for the IVI shell, a simple-dmabuf-egl client, output streaming via a new remoting plug-in, various libweston improvements, and other changes.

Since Wayland 1.16, its code-base has seen making keymaps be made private with the new version of the protocol, various memory leak fixes in the tests and scanner, and as part of the protocol preferring wl_surface.damage_buffer over wl_surface.damage.