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Povilas from the linked article here. Having support in X (even if only in proposal stage) will allow much easier work in the toolkit and application layers. X
by p12tic 6y ago
Povilas from the linked article here.
Having support in X (even if only in proposal stage) will allow much easier work in the toolkit and application layers. X and Wayland cover essentially al Linux users, so we will not need to estimate how many users will benefit from implementing gesture support in toolkit X or application Y. It will make convincing project maintainers easier.
This is really important, because maintainers of open source projects don't usually care about suggested features if they're not interested in them themselves. A new feature means additional work to them - discussing the design, reviewing PRs and handling of eventual bugs. Often the person who implements a feature disappears after the PR is merged. This makes the maintainers to view all feature proposals with a grain of salt. We need to have a convincing story of how majority end users would benefit in order to make the contributions easier.
Technical skill is not enough when contributing in open source. Politics are often as important.
- ZeroCool2u 6y agoHi Povilas, thanks for the reply. To be clear, you're saying that implementation in the applications/toolkits ecosystem is the barrier to a better trackpad experience on Linux and that by unifying the feature set of both X and Wayland, this will encourage that implementation among the developers of the applications/toolkits? If that's correct, that is one angle I had not considered before. It's also somewhat unfortunate that it was not spelled out more clearly in Bill's post, but hindsight is 20-20 of course.
- p12tic 6y ago> To be clear, you're saying that implementation in the applications/toolkits ecosystem is the barrier to a better trackpad experience on Linux and that by unifying the feature set of both X and Wayland, this will encourage that implementation among the developers of the applications/toolkits? Yes, exactly. AFAIK only Gtk right now supports any kind of touchpad gestures on Linux. Also, most of the users are still on Xorg and it's right now unknown when Wayland will be the default universally. So we would be in a weak position to demand maintainers attention, as there's little immediate benefit.