Stopping X11 maintenance after Plasma 5.12

[Martin Flöser]

Am 2017-12-05 18:07, schrieb Eike Hein:
> On 12/06/2017 01:31 AM, Martin Flöser wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> this is just an early heads-up that I decided to personally stop any
>> work related to X11 after Plasma 5.12. That is I will not add any new
>> X11 specific code to e.g. KWin and I will not fix any bugs related to
>> X11. I'll do that for 5.12, but not for 5.13. KWin itself is something 
>> I
>> already consider feature frozen for X11, so any changes brought in 
>> after
>> 5.12 will get an automatic reject by me.
> 
> I assume you mean X11-*specific* feature submissions would be
> rejected, right? Would features correctly implemented on both
> be accepted, or would they have to be Wayland-only at that
> point?

No, I mean every new feature for X11. Giving a specific example:
We want to add a new property for exchange and have an implementation 
for ShellClient (Wayland) and one for Client (X11). I would allow the 
ShellClient in, but would refuse the Client one.

Short reasoning: I noticed that most issues we had in the last versions 
in KWin were only in new X11 code. A huge problem in that regard is:
  * that I don't run this code
  * that we cannot test it

The quality of the X11 code is way lower as we don't have auto tests (we 
are now at 118 tests, line coverage of KWin core is at 62 %). The number 
of bugs introduced in new Wayland code is really low and if it happens 
our test suite is nowadays good enough to catch them before they hit 
users.

If I compare that to X11... Adding touch screen borders on X11 was a 
mess. We had to fix regressions in several releases. On Wayland no bug 
fix was required. Or the fixing of the NVIDIA specific OpenGL issue - we 
even had to do an emergency release. Or the kglobalaccel changes which 
we had to revert. On X11 things break and bind resources. I wouldn't 
mind the new features. What I mind are the regressions they cause. And 
if it's just the time I have to go through the bugs.

Due to that: absolute feature freeze for X11.

Cheers
Martin