Wayland 1.17 & Weston 6.0 Reach Alpha, Officially Releasing Next Month

Out today are the first alpha releases for Wayland 1.17 and the Weston 6.0 reference compositor. This alpha release is about two weeks behind schedule but the developers have updated their plans to now ship the beta releases on 5 March, release candidates begin on 12 March, and potentially releasing the stable versions of Wayland 1.17.0 and Weston 6.0.0 on 19 March.

The Wayland 1.17 Alpha release adds to the protocol support for expressing an internal server error message as well as an updated wl_seat protocol. There are also memory leak fixes for the Wayland scanner and various test updates. Details on the 1.17 alpha via wayland-devel.

Also out today is the Weston 6.0 Alpha. On the Weston compositor front they have shifted to using the Meson build system while deprecating Autotools, XDG-Shell stable support, FreeRDP 2.0 updates, IVI shell improvements, and many other changes.

Meanwhile, Daniel Stone has proposed today expanding the scope of Wayland-Protocols and introducing a governance model to this collection of add-on Wayland protocols. As part of this, there is also a desire to list compositors/frameworks/clients that support the different Wayland protocols to help application developers in understanding the support target and coverage by existing protocols. There's also other suggestions up for discussion about improving the protocol handling/nomination process moving forward, which may be of interest to Wayland stakeholders.