I have started working on an open source project which is going to implement the wayland protocol. I find this awesome as I am doing this as part of my University project of the fourth semester. I am doing it merely a semester earlier (because I wanted to).

Now, to the subject of the actual blog post: Documentation! To be honest, I always dismissed documentation as being second rank (and sometimes still do) despite learning everyday how annoying it is to dive into a library/software that is not properly documented.

In this case it is libwayland. I really appreciate the effort that have gone into the project so far, but getting started in developing a compositor for it is sooooooooo annoying! First of all, there is no real code documentation. Sure, there exist documents that lie out how it is built up. But just because now you know component X and Y exist doesn’t mean you know how to use them correctly.

Then there is the other problem child. Weston itself. Just look at it’s source. You cannot expect anyone to seriously read that through and get a good idea of what is going on. It’s 4805 lines of code! When I first saw that I thought I got the wrong sources. But no, it seems that this is a monolithic c file.

I do recognize though that they have splitted up some parts, but it’s not getting really better there. But do not get me wrong, I am not expecting Weston to be a representation of a sample compositor. But as it is made by the same people who have designed wayland I am a bit disappointed how the code looks like. (Severly infact)

This has not stopped me from trying to find out how to get wayland do your bidding. A few resources have been helpful (you can check them out in the wiki of the associated object) and by now we manage to communicate with a desktop client. We’ve only been at it for 2 weeks, but it’s shaping up nicely in my opinion.