Weston 1.12 compositor has been released as well

Sep 21, 2016 21:30 GMT  ·  By

Today, September 21, 2016, Bryce Harrington has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability of the Wayland 1.12.0 display server for GNU/Linux operating systems, along with the Weston 1.12.0 compositor.

Development for Wayland 1.12 and Weston 1.12 started exactly a month ago when the first Alpha build was seeded to public testers, and it already contained many of the new functionalities and improvements implemented in this final build we can install today on our GNU/Linux distributions.

Since then, several other development builds have been released for testing, but no other major features were added, only small bug fixes. Therefore, we believe that many of you monitoring the Wayland/Weston development builds may be aware that it comes with a new wl_display_add_protocol logger API.

"A new wl_display_add_protocol logger API provides a new, interactive way to debug requests; along with this are new APIs for examining clients and their resources. This is analogous to using WAYLAND_DEBUG=1, but more powerful since it allows run time review of log data such as through a UI view," says Bryce Harrington in the announcement.

Wayland core protocol documentation and XML scanner improvements

Other significant improvements in the Wayland 1.12 release include multiple refinements to the Wayland core protocol documentation, improving both its consistency and clarity for package maintainers who want to distribute the next-gen display server on their distributions.

The Wayland protocol XML scanner has been improved as well to better support version identification in protocol headers, thus enhancing the detection of different versions of the protocols of the clients and compositors used. Lastly, several of the blank areas of the protocol documentation have been fleshed out.

On the other hand, Weston 1.12 brings many improvements on its own, such as experimental libweston and libweston-desktop libraries, support for XDG-Shell protocol version 6, a pointer locking and confinement API, and removal of the Raspberry Pi backend (rpi-backend) and renderer. Download Wayland 1.12 and Weston 1.12 right now via our website.