Dear Simon On Sat, Apr 06, 2019 at 10:20:26PM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
It's perhaps important to point out before this thread gets much further that Wayland is not like Xorg
Apologies for not being clearer in my original message. Thank you for clearing that up.
GNOME in buster has defaulted to Wayland mode since August 2017. The default could presumably be swapped back to X11, as we did for stretch,
Apparently Ubuntu decided that it was not suitable (yet) as the default for 18.04, which was an LTS release, and still stuck with Xorg for 18.10. I don't know what criteria they used to make that decision, but I would imagine it should be very similar to ours. Especially for an LTS release. I also don't know what the status is for 19.04 which is presumably expected soon.
but I'm not sure whether post-hard-freeze is necessarily an appropriate time to do that.
The freeze is a tool we use to try and ensure a quality and orderly release. If we collectively agree that this change is necessary for the quality of our release, then I'd hope the release team would also agree that such a change was worthy of a freeze exception. But both of these hypotheticals are a few steps ahead of where we are now.
If I understand correctly, the pattern that led to synaptic's removal is that it runs its full GUI as root, which isn't supported by the way many (all?) Wayland environments set up Xwayland.
I think that's right. I appreciate that this is has been considered a bad approach to the problem for a long time, long before Wayland. I suspect, but have not confirmed, that it is not the only program that will fail to work properly in a Wayland environment. It's probably one of the more high profile programs to break in Debian, though. Another I'd like to verify is gparted. Would the GNOME team kindly share with this thread the criteria that you folks use to make your decision as to whether to default to Wayland in Debian? Best wishes -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Jonathan Dowland ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://jmtd.net ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Please do not CC me, I am subscribed to the list.
