XWayland 21.1 Proposed In Splitting Off Releases From The X.Org Server

With no new X.Org Server releases on the horizon but Red Hat / Fedora wanting to ship updated XWayland support that is developed as part of the X.Org Server code-base, Red Hat engineers are now stepping up to carry out such XWayland-only releases derived from the same source tree but stripping out the code not relevant to XWayland support.

As previously noted, Fedora is looking to provide standalone XWayland packages that would be tracking the X.Org Server Git state but without going through and actually updating the X.Org Server itself for legacy use-cases or going through the upstream release management processes on X.Org itself.

Rather than doing it at the distribution-level, Red Hat's Michel Dänzer has laid out the proposal for upstream XWayland-only release branches for the X.Org Server.

The proposal would branch the code from X.Org Server's current "master branch", drop out the Autotools build system, and drop other code not necessary to XWayland operation. One exception is keeping Xvfb support around for unit tests. The Meson build system would be updated for generating these XWayland-only releases.

These would be XWayland-only releases for those wanting the newer code without resorting to building X.Org Server Git or hoping there is a new upstream server release. Versioning would be done on a YEAR.MINOR basis with XWayland 21.1.0 slated to be the first release.

Assuming no major objections come up, the hope is to issue the first XWayland release in early 2021 and to get that package into Fedora 34 for providing better XWayland support compared to the state of X.Org Server 1.20.

The proposal is awaiting feedback/comments and was just published a short time ago via the X.Org Server Gitlab.