Ubuntu 13.04 Will Enable Wayland Support In GTK+

While Canonical developers previously said they "won't fix" GTK+ support for Wayland in Ubuntu, the matter has now changed. It looks like Ubuntu 13.04 will be able to handle GTK+ applications on Wayland.

An open bug concerning enabling the Wayland back-end for GNOME's GTK+ tool-kit was previously marked as "won't fix" by Iain Lane, a Canonical employee. He says they didn't want libgtk=3.0 having a Wayland dependency and on libxkbcommon. He suggested that Wayland fans simply use a Wayland-supported GTK+ PPA package archive.

It turns out now that the GTK+ package for Ubuntu 13.04 will have Wayland support. It turns out that growing a dependency on the Wayland library within Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" is now libegl1-mesa, the Mesa package with EGL support, and then the Empathy and Totem applications from GNOME. Due to these dependencies, "libwayland0" will already be bundled on the installation media for Ubuntu 13.04. Cogl, Clutter OpenGL, also depends upon this Mesa EGL support that in turn demands the Wayland library be present. With the Wayland library present on the next Ubuntu Linux install media, there's no reason GTK+ can't share in the support.

Iain Lane wrote today in the same bug report:

So libwayland0 is on media already. So I do think you can go ahead and enable the wayland backend if you have the patches prepared already, or I can do it tomorrow assuming I still have the packages I made while originally evaluating the fix for this bug.

A nice reversal that will now allow the Ubuntu-packaged GTK+ tool-kit to dynamically play atop Wayland in addition to X11.