Bug#1006593: ITP: river -- Dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

[Nick Hastings <nicholaschastings@gmail.com>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Nick Hastings <nicholaschastings@gmail.com>
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org, nicholaschastings@gmail.com

* Package name    : river
  Version         : 0.1.3
  Upstream Author : Isaac Freund <mail@isaacfreund.com>
* URL             : https://github.com/riverwm/river
* License         : GPL-3.0
  Programming Lang: Zig
  Description     : Dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

This is the River, dynamic tiling Wayland compositor which includes a
flexible runtime configuration.

Debian currently seems to have no Wayland compositor that can perform
as replacement for the dynamic tiling X11 window mangers like dwm,
awesome, xmonad, etc. River is such a Wayland compositor. Although it
is still under early development it is already extremely capable
and stable.

I have already created a package for river. River has one main
blocking dependency, zig, for which an ITP exists. However, progress on
that package seems to have stalled and as such I have also created a
zig package. See
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=995670 regarding
zig.

My river and zig packages can be found on mentors.d.n at
https://mentors.debian.net/package/river/ and
https://mentors.debian.net/package/zig/

I have been using river built with these packages on bullseye (after
backporting some dependencies from testing/unstable) as my daily
driver for almost two months.

Note that a tiling Wayland compositor, sway, already exists in
Debian. However, sway is a drop in replacement for i3 and as such
provides a very different experience to the dynamic tiling scheme from
river. As I understand it, there is no plan for sway to ever be
extended to include this sort of functionality. River would uniquely
fill a large gap in the existing Wayland compositor landscape in
Debian.