Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development

Valve open-source graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz is well known in the Linux community for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code, various Mesa driver optimizations, and creative writing on his blog. He's also taken up a new task: further accelerating Wayland protocol development.

With the recent Frog-Protocols proposal by fellow Valve Linux engineer Joshua Ashton to serve as an alternative to Wayland Protocols to be able to iterate new Wayland protocols quicker, Mike Blumenkrantz is also taking to the cause for trying to get Wayland protocol development moving quicker so efforts don't get stalled for months or years at a time.

Blumenkrantz has proposed adding a new "experimental" protocol development area to Wayland-Protocols. While a protocol is still within the "experimental" folder there could be breaking changes allowed but to serve for more iterative development before being ready for staging or stable. If this "experimental" proposal gains adoption, it could help in accelerating new protocol development and get new protocols into the repository faster.

Mike Blumenkrantz and Daniel Stone are also now serving as Mesa as a member of Wayland-Protocols governance.

Mike has written a blog post today outlining the Wayland protocol development headaches as they stand currently and his hopes for helping to address the situation moving forward.