On Wed Mar 1 12:24:02 2023 +0000, Alexandros Frantzis wrote:
The last patch looks worrying in terms of forward-compatibility.
Looking at your wayland branch, you use a few unstable files. What happens if/when they get promoted to stable? Will those files be moved in wayland-protocols causing your branch to fail to build? TL;DR: Not a problem. When a protocol is moved to stable, a new copy is placed in that directory (details are different depending on whether this copy is done from 'staging' or the legacy 'unstable'), while the old xml file(s) remain in place for backward compatibility. If the new copy requires a protocol name change (e.g., from unstable->stable, but not staging->stable) compositors tend to have a long deprecation period during which both old and new names are supported. As an example, it took compositors several years to drop support for unstable/xdg-shell after the introduction of stable/xdg-shell. FWIW, the Wayland community is *very* conservative concerning promotions to stable, so a lot of functionality is still in unstable/staging. Compare: 3 stable protocols vs 27 staging/unstable, some of them having been there for many years. More information about these topics can be found at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/
Also, it would be better to have commit adding build system support
for protocol files together with at least a simple use of it in the same MR. Ack. Moved to the next MR.
Thanks for explanation, staging backward compatibility guarantees should do the trick.
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Jacek Caban (＠jacek)