Wayland Action Items You Can Start On

Tiago Vignatti, one of the active developers at Intel who's dedicated to the Wayland team, has shared some active TODO list items that for those wishing to contribute can easily jump on.

Vignatti wrote a post on his personal blog entitled starting on Wayland development. Tiago shares that while the Wayland protocol is not yet complete, there's a number of items on their growing TODO list that could be accomplished by new contributors even without much graphics or X.Org/Wayland experience.

Below is a brief summary of the items that Vignatti mentions for those interested.

- A log facility for Wayland. This would be similar to the X.Org logging with the various details being printed to some log file that's equivalent to /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Write now most of the debugging output is just written to the standard output.

- A launcher for Weston. Right now when attempting to launch this Wayland compositor you still need to manually set the input and DRM devices along with a bunch of other stuff, which isn't too user-friendly. PolicyKit can be supported here and other love is needed to make Weston easy to launch.

- Merging libxkbcommon, which is the XKB library for exposing the keyboard mapping logic to clients along with other keyboard-related work. This is from X.Org, but it can be used by the Wayland Display Server too. Let's just hope it doesn't bring any nasty security issues.

- XWayland, the implementation of Wayland on X.Org to make it run as a Wayland client, is currently working on Intel hardware. However, Tiago believes some work might be needed so that XWayland will work with the other drivers out there. XWayland and its driver would also need to be ported to the latest upstream state. This is considered to be the most difficult action item at the moment for newcomers.