When reporting an issue with Wayland, should I use KWin's version as a reference, or something else?

[rokejulianlockhart]

Apologies if this should have been asked at somewhere like https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ instead. Because I expect that “Yes, KWin” is the answer, I’ve asked here.

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Sometimes when reporting an issue for a specific display protocol (Wayland, for instance, rather than X) I want to provide a reference to assist reproduction. As an example, I’d like to respond to Text looks bad on Wayland · Issue #386 · Stremio/stremio-shell · GitHub with an counter-example demonstrating it working for me, to help to narrow-down the scope of the issue. Because “Wayland” is merely a series of documents describing a protocol, I’d like to know what software to cite to provide an actionable reference.

This was more simple for X, since I’d go by https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org//packages/xorg-x11-server/1.20.14/35.fc40/x86_64/xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.20.14-35.fc40.x86_64.rpm. However, the architecture of Wayland causes me to expect that the compositor is what I should reference.

I can see at Wayland (protocol) - Wikipedia that libwayland-server and libwayland-client are probably what I really want to use as references, but I don’t see them installed as discrete packages, so are they compiled into KWin? If so, I’ll just cite https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org//packages/kwin/6.0.4.1/1.fc40/x86_64/kwin-wayland-6.0.4.1-1.fc40.x86_64.rpm.

[ngraham]

Technically speaking the only “issues with Wayland” would be bugs or omissions in protocols themselves. Examples of these would be:

• Lack of a common session restore protocol that compositors and apps could implement
• Conceptual issues with the layer-shell protocol that cause it to not be suitable for the level of flexibility with which Plasma allows people to configure their panels (see 477939 – Center-aligned panels cause left/right/top/bottom aligned panels sharing the same edge to not touch that edge)

Other issues are caused by bugs and implementation issues in compositors or toolkits. A common example in Plasma 6 would be weirdly rendered text in QtQuick apps when using fractional scaling and a low to medium resolution screen; see 479891 – Some text glyphs in QML software are mis-aligned or squished when using a fractional scale factor. This is probably an issue in Qt somewhere, even though it only manifests in a Wayland session.

[rokejulianlockhart]

@ngraham

Other issues are caused by bugs and implementation issues in compositors or toolkits. A common example in Plasma 6 would be weirdly rendered text in QtQuick apps when using fractional scaling and a low to medium resolution screen; see 479891 – Some text glyphs in QML software are mis-aligned or squished when using a fractional scale factor. This is probably an issue in Qt somewhere, even though it only manifests in a Wayland session.

In which case KWin seems like the best reference when which to use in not obvious, because it’s more likely an issue with the compositor than Wayland. Thanks, @ngraham.