Wayland & Weston Saw Fewer Commits In 2014
![WAYLAND](/assets/categories/wayland.webp)
2014 saw the releases of Wayland 1.6 and Wayland 1.5 with the many improvements it brought to core Wayland along with the Weston reference compositor.
In the second half of 2014 was when Wayland founder Kristian Høgsberg began distancing himself from the Wayland project while continuing to be employed by Intel and most recently working on the Skylake Mesa code. Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has basically been serving as the release manager for Wayland/Weston.
In looking at the Git statistics for Wayland, the numbers aren't too bright:
The lower numbers just aren't due to Wayland stabilizing, but the Weston reference compositor where lots of experimenting happens saw a sharply lower 2014.
The slower Wayland/Weston development could be partially justified at least by the protocol beginning to stabilize and have the necessary functionality needed to support the Linux desktop. There's also a lot of related development happening outside of Wayland/Weston proper such as to GNOME's Mutter, other desktop compositors, libinput, Pixman, DRM and Mesa, etc. At this point though only time will tell whether 2015 is finally the year of the Wayland Linux desktop with at least one major tier-one Linux distribution shipping it enabled by default... It could quite possibly be Fedora, but we'll see. Let us know what you think in the forums.
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