Introducing Wayland's Weston Launcher

The other Wayland-related news yesterday besides the surprise announcement that the Wayland 1.0 stable release is approaching was the first-shot attempt at "weston-launch", an easy launcher for the demo Weston compositor.

The weston-launch component created by Benjamin Franzke is meant to make it very easy to launch Weston, the demo/reference compositor for Wayland.

Running weston-launch will launch Weston, provides a mechanism for Weston to set/drop the DRM master, open a TTY, and read input devices without being the root user. A launcher for Weston was one of the major TODO list items noted recently by Tiago Vignatti, who is part of the Wayland team at Intel.

This medium-complexity item was described by Tiago as:

Weston is meant to run as a normal user. Now we have to set manually input devices, DRM and tty with root permissions, so Weston can happily be started. Ideally we should have a setuid helper script doing all this tricky, and in fact I started something here. For a real system though, we need to enhance a bit this program with the policykit, specially for dealing with hotplugs. Probably zero understanding on Wayland internals is needed but an overall knowledge of OS is required.

This item can now be marked off the list. The weston-launch mailing list discussion begins here.

Stay tuned for more Wayland and X.Org news this weekend on Phoronix during FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium.