On Tue Dec 5 10:28:36 2023 +0000, Rémi Bernon wrote:
The question is whether this is ever going to be renamed to something else (like "stable", and prefixes from "zwp_" to "wp_") when moving them out of unstable (as they want to do it in https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/25...), and how certain we can be that nobody will drop the "unstable" flavor in the future and break old Wine versions that were using it. From that MR discussion it looks like they are in an awkward position with these unstable protocols as many people have started implementing and using it in production, which is quite unfortunate for something that was supposed to be a draft. I understand from https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/25... that these protocols are meant to be moved to "staging" instead, so that probably means they are then supposed to be supported forever, but it is still not yet the case. Realistically we can probably assume that, but I can only say how ugly if feels.
The situation with "unstable" is indeed unfortunate, and hence why the community has moved to the "staging" approach (i.e., no name changes when becoming stable). Practically I don't expect this to be an issue, since these protocols are used very widely and breaking compatibility (e.g., renaming zwp -> wp without also keeping support for the old name) will be a total nightmare.
Besides the naming aspect, the stability of the pointer-constraints protocol is attested by:
1. It's in the list of protocols considered in the move-to-staging wayland-protocols MR above. 2. It's implemented by all major compositors: https://wayland.app/protocols/pointer-constraints-unstable-v1#compositor-sup... 3. Hasn't had any functional change since its introduction https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/commits/main/unst...