Post by @jamey@toot.cat

I'm writing a Wayland client that draws the X root weave just to really confuse those of us who remember it. And I'm doing it with Vulkan and Rust, which I gather is particularly upsetting to some oddly sensitive people.

I have good reasons for why all of the above are the right choice for what I'm doing, but after seeing how some people reacted last week to the "news" that I was writing Wayland-related software at all, frankly I'm also happy to further upset those people in particular. Spitefulness is wildly out of character for me but, seriously, what the fuck

matttproud.com (blog)

Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple

If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex: Oh, my old friend. How it’s been a long time. Cultural Significance For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen for the X Window System, specifically the pattern it uses as the background of the root window. This pattern is technically called a stipple.

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d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 1 hr. ago

@jamey the issue with wayland is when upstreams way up in the dependency tree disable support for X and then act snotty and dismissive about how that means a lot of people are forced to do extra unpaid work to provide features their users want. if engineering for portability and genuinely interacting with downstreams to ensure compatibility of these core components with nonstandard OSes/compilers/architectures/init systems is maintained, there would be no controversy

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 1 hr. ago

@jamey a wayland client to do cool shit is not one of those core upstream components and you can do whatever you want with it. yes wayland is way more modular and this should enable greater portability. but people who are in the position of maintaining these core components aren't putting in the work to ensure portability and you should care about that since it directly limits the systems your work can run on!

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 1 hr. ago

@jamey the fallacy i'm seeing in the wayland space is really similar to the one i see from nix users, which is the assumption that just because the technology you're working with can be made more flexible and portable, that any complaints about how that fails in practice are invalid (and probably just jealous). that's a really contemptuous way to interact with people who want to use your work

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 1 hr. ago

@jamey i'm not calling you contemptuous (for example, i was really thankful to hear your thoughtful criticisms of projects in the wasm space, and wasm itself) but i do think it's worth understanding the legitimate complaints around portability as a separate group from the thoughtless complaints against wayland and systemd that tend to get platformed over the legitimate ones. surely you've seen people misrepresent your complaints before—i would urge you to consider that this happens to others too

~5 more replies

Jamey Sharp

@jamey@toot.cat 58 min. ago

@hipsterelectron you and I have had good conversations, so I'm going to go ahead and ask: what led you to think that these replies would be helpful or useful?

you could have started with, for example, finding out what kinds of responses I'm actually reacting to, rather than blindly telling me I should treat them as having legitimate concerns

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 44 min. ago

@jamey ah ok, it sounds like this won't be an effective discussion. i was interested in describing portability as a concern i personally had, and explained pretty directly what i wanted the wayland and rust communities to improve upon, particularly pointing to the responsibility of upstream dependencies to maintain portability as they move to more modern architectures. if this isn't an issue you're interested in, i don't think i want to do the work to convince you of that.

i am however working to make bootstrappability easier without losing modularity, through a new architecture for build tooling and application packaging. so i hope to help improve the situation i described, and perhaps we can come back to this when i've succeeded in that goal

Jamey Sharp

@jamey@toot.cat 35 min. ago

@hipsterelectron I wish you luck in your efforts. I've put a lot of work into trying to build good transition plans in various settings, like Xlib/XCB and Corrode.

it's just that that's not related to what I was saying. if you want to see what kind of bad reactions I'm referring to, see the comments section at https://www.phoronix.com/news/Jamey-Sharp-Praises-Wayland and the anger people expressed when I simply said I like the design of the Wayland protocol.

X.Org XCB Co-Creator Praises Wayland's Protocol Design

Open-source developer Jamey Sharp who is a longtime X.Org developer and co-creator of the X protocol C-language Binding (XCB) finally had the need to write a Wayland client and ended up praising its design.

Sriram "sri" Ramkrishna - 😼

@sri@mastodon.social 20 min. ago

@jamey @hipsterelectron I took a gander of those comments. It could be a lot worse. The phoronix comment section has gotten better since they added emoji reactions. The bad takes tend to get "downvoted".

Still, it can still ruin your day. Hugs.

Wesley Moore

@wezm@mastodon.decentralised.social 1 hr. ago

@jamey this sounds excellent on all fronts 😄️

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