Bug#854429: task-desktop: Please allow Wayland systems without X.Org
On Tue, 07 Feb 2017 at 03:25:30 +0100, intrigeri@debian.org wrote:
> I see:
>
> $ aptitude why xorg
> i task-gnome-desktop Depends task-desktop
> i A task-desktop Depends xorg
>
> What can possibly go wrong™ if we replaced:
>
> Depends: tasksel (= 3.39), xorg, xserver-xorg-video-all, xserver-xorg-input-all, desktop-base
>
> with something like:
>
> Depends: tasksel (= 3.39), xorg | wayland, xserver-xorg-video-all | wayland, xserver-xorg-input-all | wayland, desktop-base
>
> ?
There is no such thing as the "wayland" package: that's not how Wayland
works. In the X11 protocol, you run an X11 display server, then run a
window manager (and perhaps a separate or integrated compositor) inside
that; but in Wayland, you just run a Wayland compositor (like GNOME Shell
or Weston), and it provides the equivalent of both the display server
and the window manager/compositor. The Wayland compositors mostly share
code via libraries rather than by running an external binary, apart from
Xwayland (an X11 server that is also a Wayland client, similar to Xming
on Windows and XQuartz on macOS) as a compatibility layer for X11 apps.
xorg isn't particularly huge, and it gives the desktop session the
opportunity to fall back to X11 if Wayland doesn't work on your
hardware/drivers (gdm/GNOME can do this) or if you specifically choose
to run an X11 session as a workaround for apps that don't work under
XWayland (gdm in buster offers "GNOME on Xorg" in the list of desktop
environments for this reason). I think task-desktop should probably
continue to pull in Xorg for buster, at least at a Recommends level.
(task-gnome-desktop Depends gnome-core Depends gdm3 Recommends
xserver-xorg, so GNOME desktops get Xwayland as a hard dependency and
Xorg in transitive Recommends already.)
smcv
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