GNOME Rolls Out The GTK Text Input Protocol For Wayland

[finalzone]

So, I open an input method, type in my characters, and only Gnome apps will receive them because the IM protocol is internal to Mutter and Gnome apps, so other de jure standard Wayland apps will not receive the input because it's not targeted at them? Or does it mean I can't use IMs or OSKs on a Mutter-based desktop, tablet, or phone if I don't maintain purity of Gnomish essence in my selection of applications.

The codes are available for any developer to look and improve them under GPL. Should you read the commit, that implementation is currently experimental for a reason. It is nothing new in the desktop ecosystem so the complaint is just noise.

[bregma]

That was no nonsense. Mir fragmented the graphics stack at the most fundamental level because it required both its own patched drivers and patched Mesa. DDX drivers and X even had to be patched so that XMir could be possible. And upstream would never carry these patches, so it was Ubuntu vs the rest of Linux. Which means that users are at the mercy of Canonical if they wanted drivers, xserver and Mesa versions greater than what Ubuntu was carrying in its repositories because they would not work on Mir without extensive patching.

None of the whole Mir vs Wayland would ever had happened if Mir was designed as a Wayland compositor right from the beginning, instead of doing its own thing. Even with this new GTK and Gnome-exclusive protocol, the graphics stack remains untouched; the same upstream drivers and Mesa still work and will continue to work across all Wayland compositors, from Mutter to KWin and Weston and the new Mir-Wayland compositor.

Well, speaking as an insider who was closely involved, I can see you ignorance and bias has lead you to an incorrect conclusion.

There was no requirement on Mir's part for any change to the graphics drivers, and Xmir required the same support from x.org as XWayland did. There was no special requirements on video driver either in the kernel or in x.org. It's true that Mir required modification to Mesa, but the problem was never that these would not be accepted upstream, it's that they were never in good enough shape to push upstream as requirements thrash prevented us from paying off the technical debt that had mounted. Updating your drivers or X server was never a problem since XMir kept up with x.org releases and was build as a separate server with the DDX add-on (in other words complete orthogonal to the regular X11 server).

So really, Mir did not fragment the graphics stack, the problem you described never existed, and the Mesa integration was on track to be resolved withing a few months.

It's all water under the bridge now.

It's also irrelevant to the GTK+/Mutter developers providing exclusive functionality through a new API for input methods. It's basically moving from "Wayland for all" to "Wayland or GNOME's Wayland, you much choose."

[You-]

[QUOTE=bregma;n1002400]

So, I open an input method, type in my characters, and only Gnome apps will receive them because the IM protocol is internal to Mutter and Gnome apps, so other de jure standard Wayland apps will not receive the input because it's not targeted at them? Or does it mean I can't use IMs or OSKs on a Mutter-based desktop, tablet, or phone if I don't maintain purity of Gnomish essence in my selection of applications?/QUOTE]

From my reading none of them. All apps will keep working. All IM apps will also keep working. However when the compositor takes over the input (what this protocol does), it will allow the the compositor only to recieve the events instead of the focused app. The compositor can then pass them to the focussed app, or do something else with it.

I may be wrong, but an example could be a hotkey for IM or something else. press the key and type, the text will go to the app chosen via the compositor instead of to whatever you have open.

[You-]

It's also irrelevant to the GTK+/Mutter developers providing exclusive functionality through a new API for input methods. It's basically moving from "Wayland for all" to "Wayland or GNOME's Wayland, you much choose."

Not really - wayland was designed to allow multiple protocols. Its design is being used here. Well or badly, we will find outat a later date.

[starshipeleven]

There was no special requirements on video driver either in the kernel or in x.org. It's true that Mir required modification to Mesa, but the problem was never that these would not be accepted upstream, it's that they were never in good enough shape to push upstream as requirements thrash prevented us from paying off the technical debt that had mounted.

I guess the patches that Intel devs refused to accept to be able to run XMir on Intel xorg driver (NOT mesa, xf86-video-intel) were fake news then. https://arstechnica.com/information-...to-go-own-way/