Wayland Gets A "Super" Repository For C.I.

The latest out of the Wayland development camp is a new, super CI repository setup by a Red Hat engineer that should make it easier to test out Wayland and its reference Weston compositor.

Casey Dahlin of Red Hat, a name that hasn't been too active in the Wayland development scene up until now, has shared on the mailing list his wayland-cint repository. It's a continuous integration repository that's basically intended to make it easier to build Wayland from source. This repository automatically fetches the latest Wayland/Weston code along with all of its needed dependencies into a single source tree.

Dahlin explains, "Basically, the idea is that all the packages mentioned in Wayland's build instructions[1] are checked out as submodules[2]. With a couple of commands all the source is checked out, and the Makefile in the root of the repo can build and clean them all together. Right now it has latest masters for everything as of last night. I'd like to do a 0.85 branch but we'd have to discuss policy on what dependencies get updated to what bar."

Wayland has come a long ways from the original days when you needed a non-stock Linux kernel and special Mesa code in order to get Wayland running on hardware, but there's still some obvious dependencies needed to get Wayland/Weston working like a supported EGL-bearing Mesa, libxkbcommon, and Cairo. Assuming you have supported graphics hardware/drivers (basically an open-source Radeon/Intel/Nouveau system), it's not too bad building Wayland from source, but by pulling the single "wayland-cint" repository it could be even easier.

This is really good if wanting to do per-commit testing of Wayland/Weston with unit tests or even performance tests. Once Wayland is a bit further along and running more GL workloads natively and within XWayland, I may have to setup a Phoromatic Tracker in conjunction with OpenBenchmarking.org to track Wayland on a per-commit basis to reduce the risk of regressions.

The Git repository for this simple and easy way to build Wayland is currently on Gitorious and not FreeDesktop.org like the rest of Wayland.

For those not comfortable building Wayland Git from source, there are some other ways to try out Wayland, such as using the Rebecca Black OS. Wayland can be found in the Ubuntu 12.04 universe repository, among other distribution repositories, but the versions in the tier-one distributions right now tend to be outdated and feature-incomplete compared to Git or lacking other support like Wayland-enabled tool-kits, etc.

If you missed it, there's also progress on GTK applications running under Wayland and upstream progress on making Wayland rock via the LF Collaboration Summit.