Wayland's Weston Moving Towards Its Next Release Soon

Longtime Wayland developer Derek Foreman is working on coordinating the next release of the Weston reference compositor. Here are those early details and his hope to ship this next feature release in March.

Derek is tentatively proposing a February feature freeze and for this next Weston update to debut in March. At this time there are no plans for an updated Wayland release with there being no pressing changes on the horizon.

Among the possibilities for this next Weston release include:

- The last release with Autotools support, after which they will drop it in favor of the Meson build system. Initial Meson support was added after the most recent Weston 5.0 release.

- The RDP compositor back-end has been updated to work against the latest FreeRDP 2.0.

- Potentially dropping Weston's FBDEV back-end. All major hardware these days has DRM drivers while this FBDEV back-end tends just to be a nuisance to maintain.

- Possibly seeing XDG-Shell support for the Weston In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) shell. This functionality is already in use by Automotive Grade Linux.

- The simple-dmabuf-egl client is present that uses EGL with OpenGL ES 2.0 to draw DMA-BUF buffers as an example with EGLImages and FBOs.

- An initial remoting plug-in for output streaming.

- Various additions to libweston.

This next version will most likely be Weston 6.0. The early plans can be found via this mailing list thread.