Goals/Wayland: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:45, 28 September 2019

Intro

KDE community has elected to finalize the transition to Wayland and embrace the future of desktop.

Wayland has been a great interest and effort to the KDE community as it aligns with its values and goals : security, lightweight and beauty.

This goal will articulate in tracking down and fixing the issues that keeps our software from achieving feature parity with the venerable X Window system. Our focus will be our own community software, KWin, Plasma and Apps but will also be about helping the wider free software community to advance Wayland feature set.

This is an ambitious goal, it cannot be a small team effort, we invite the wider community to participate.

How to help

There are a few ways to help this goal, some requiring no particular skills.

Bug triaging

In order to fix bugs, we need to have precise reporting. Often we need to reproduce the issues reported, check it is not missing relevant information, ask for more information, ask to test a fix etc...

All of those actions are essential to the community to be able to fix the issues, and anyone can help. You can find the reported wayland bugs in bugs

Testing

You can run plasma or a KDE Application and report an issue in the bug tracker using the keyword wayland. You don't need a wayland session to test apps in wayland just startplasmacompositor dolphin to try it out within wayland.

Developing

There are different ways you can contribute coding, you can pick a wayland bug in the known bugs and give a crack at it.

The simplest way would be to send patches for an application to fix their wayland shortcomings, you can use the wayland porting notes to help you.

For more advanced contribution, you can try to fix a plasma wayland issue, setting up a plasma developer environment and send a patch to phabricator. And finally you can hack on KWin and Kwayland and following the developer environment setup start your journey with kdesrc-build kwin.

Documentation

We have a few documentation pages to help with debugging and fixing bugs.

For Wayland debugging tips and general information
For app developers and maintainers we have a documentation to help porting to wayland
For new developer contributors wanting to start hacking

KDE community projects

KWin and KWayland

KWin as the KDE wayland compositor is the main component establishing a wayland session. KWayland is an essential library wrapping low-level wayland API to higher-level Qt-Style API. Their work board is located at https://phabricator.kde.org/project/view/98/

Plasma

Plasma, the KDE desktop, needs a lot of integration with wayland and KWin in order to provide a smooth experience. Its wayland work board is located at https://phabricator.kde.org/project/view/99/

Apps

KDE has many great applications and we want to make sure they work flawlessly under Wayland. We will be helping the apps contributors testing and fixing their wayland support.

Upstream projects

libinput

Libinput as the input library for Wayland is a major dependency of Plasma and a few of our apps. We will probably need to work with upstream, to achieve our goal.

Qt and QtWayland

We might encounter issues with Qt or QtWayland in which case we will work with the Qt community to fix them.

SDDM

SDDM as our main desktop manager, will need some contribution of our community to take full advantage of wayland.

Currently reported Wayland bugs

You can find open bugs associated with Wayland with this query.

@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
 This is an ambitious goal, it cannot be a small team effort, we invite the wider community to participate.
+== How to help ==
+There are a few ways to help this goal, some requiring no particular skills.
+=== Bug triaging ===
+In order to fix bugs, we need to have precise reporting. Often we need to reproduce the issues reported, check it is not missing relevant information, ask for more information, ask to test a fix etc...
+All of those actions are essential to the community to be able to fix the issues, and anyone can help.
+You can find the reported wayland bugs in [https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=NEEDSINFO&bug_status=REOPENED&keywords=wayland%2C%20&keywords_type=allwords&list_id=1662528&query_format=advanced bugs]
+=== Testing ===
+You can run plasma or a KDE Application and [https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/Issue_Reporting report an issue] in the bug tracker using the keyword wayland.
+You don't need a wayland session to test apps in wayland just ''startplasmacompositor dolphin'' to try it out within wayland.
+=== Developing ===
+There are different ways you can contribute coding, you can pick a wayland bug in the known [https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=NEEDSINFO&bug_status=REOPENED&keywords=wayland%2C%20&keywords_type=allwords&list_id=1662528&query_format=advanced bugs] and give a crack at it.
+The simplest way would be to send patches for an application to fix their wayland shortcomings, you can use [https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Wayland_Porting_Notes the wayland porting notes] to help you.
+For more advanced contribution, you can try to fix a plasma wayland issue, setting up a [https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/development plasma developer environment] and send a patch to [https://community.kde.org/Infrastructure/Phabricator phabricator].
+And finally you can hack on KWin and Kwayland and following the [https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/development developer environment setup] start your journey with ''kdesrc-build kwin''.
 == Documentation ==
@@ Line 14: / Line 36: @@
 * For [https://community.kde.org/KWin/Wayland Wayland debugging tips and general information]
 * For app developers and maintainers we have a documentation to [https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Wayland_Porting_Notes help porting to wayland]
-* For new developers contributor wanting [https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/development to start hacking]
+* For new developer contributors wanting [https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/development to start hacking]
 == KDE community projects ==
 === KWin and KWayland ===
-Work board is located at https://phabricator.kde.org/project/view/98/
+KWin as the KDE wayland compositor is the main component establishing a wayland session.
+KWayland is an essential library wrapping low-level wayland API to higher-level Qt-Style API.
+Their work board is located at https://phabricator.kde.org/project/view/98/
 === Plasma ===
-Work board is located at https://phabricator.kde.org/project/view/99/
+Plasma, the KDE desktop, needs a lot of integration with wayland and KWin in order to provide a smooth experience.
+Its wayland work board is located at https://phabricator.kde.org/project/view/99/
 === Apps ===
@@ Line 37: / Line 62: @@
 === SDDM ===
-[https://github.com/sddm/sddm SDDM] as our main desktop manager, will need some contribution of our community.
+[https://github.com/sddm/sddm SDDM] as our main desktop manager, will need some contribution of our community to take full advantage of wayland.
 == Currently reported Wayland bugs ==
 You can find open bugs associated with Wayland with
 [https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=NEEDSINFO&bug_status=REOPENED&keywords=wayland%2C%20&keywords_type=allwords&list_id=1662528&query_format=advanced this query].