Mir Developer Pleads The Case "Why Mir"

[cj.wijtmans]

Wayland protocol is described in XML, but doesn't use XML for transport. It's a binary protocol AFAIK.
It is described in XML so stuff can be generated from it.. so it makes things easier.

XML may be a bad language (it has many flaws), but OTOH it also has a very good support and is well known by the developers.

BTW. Vulkan and OpenGL API is also described in XML

Ah, described. For that XML is not bad.

[pininety]

Rgb Gamma control???? Screenshots?? Recording?? Remote desktop? Its all finished now?

Not sure about the first point but the rest has nothing to do with wayland but with the compositer.

[GI_Jack]

Now the 1million doller question:
Why weren’t you active in the development of wayland (code and mailinglists)?

This is what I wanted to know. You could have easily gotten this feature into wayland, early on in the game.

Canonical needs to go back to doing what they do best, and thats fixing day one user interface bugs that make newbies and the non-technical shit their pants.

[cj.wijtmans]

So there is no reliable way for OBS to record a wayland session?

[pininety]

So there is no reliable way for OBS to record a wayland session?

Again. That's the job of the compositer, not of wayland.

[cj.wijtmans]

Again. That's the job of the compositer, not of wayland.

That might be your ideological stance on this issue but where is the practicallity? Where is the standard for recording cross-compositor? Come back to reality!

[cj.wijtmans]

So still wayland does nothing but defragmant functionality while xorg-server does its job. This really is the dark age of the linux desktop.

[unixfan2001]

What I'd love to see is Canonical (Alan in particular) use the know-how gained from the creation of MirAl to help the GTK/Gnome people implement an easy to use, well documented API for creating compositors in GTK.

Think Qt Wayland Compositor API, basically.

[emblemparade]

You literally put your soul into your work and then a manager comes and says, "It's all scrapped, we're changing direction". I wonder if programmers have ever committed suicide because of this.

In most of the software industry you need to understand that your product is a service, not a piece of software. You are enabling users and other clients to do things. Today they might do things using this piece of code. Tomorrow it might be using another piece of code. One takes pride in the things that your code enables, not in the code itself.

There are still parts of the industry where code is far more persistent. For example, once a video game is released its code might never change, ever. In embedded/vertical markets you have "firmware" which remains firm pretty much until the machine breaks down. There's code in Voyager 1 now running outside the Solar System.

But even for those enduring product, during the process a large part of coding involves ... throwing code away. Either because your initial approach was wrong, or because it failed a code review, broke a test, or someone came up with something better suggestion, or there's a general refactoring to a different architectural style. Programmers who "fall in love" with their code are very hard to work with when decisions need to be made as a team.

[computerquip]

So there is no reliable way for OBS to record a wayland session?

Not sure if you've looked at the XSHM capture but being the guy who helped develop the original (and I have an alternative version using xcb for window capture instead of xlib which I haven't staged yet), it's not amazing. Getting the image itself takes some insane time like 20ms sometimes because you have to copy the image from the server to a shared memory segment to the client back to the renderer. That's not to mention the time it takes for the compositor to fetch the image internally as well. Generally this looks like GPU -> CPU -> CPU -> CPU -> GPU.

tl;dr: X11 works but it's horribly broken, slow, and inefficient. In the case of XComposite capture, it sometimes doesn't work for windows can't be redirected through the XComposite extensions. It's better if we fetch from the compositor directly almost always.