We concluded the Wayland Book on our book club.
What do you though of The Wayland Book?
For us who are X11 hackers, what do you think of Wayland after reading it?

Let's also vote for the next book.
These are the candidates:

• The Art of UNIX Programming.
  
• Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment (a tough book, very terse, dense on information and also very long).
  
• Introduction to Operating Systems Abstractions Using Plan 9.
  
• The Design of the UNIX Operating System.
  
• UNIX: A History and a Memoir (this one is not free, unfortunately).
  

If you have another recommendation, please comment.

(20-04-2021, 07:25 AM)phillbush Wrote: For us who are X11 hackers, what do you think of Wayland after reading it?

I quite like the concept of Wayland as a protocol definition, with the tools to automatically generate wrapper.
However, it also feels like a lot needs to be implemented by compositors and clients, plus there are ambiguous points for what the standard protocol doesn't define (which is quite a lot to be honest). There's a lot of things it gets right though, like the definition of standard singleton objects globally available that have predefined roles, asynchronicity, scaling, user input handling, direct rendering and efficiency, security, etc..
I'll be looking forward to trying it more and seeing it slowly evolve and progress to be more mature, especially new cross-compositors standards. There's a lot of good potential there.

(20-04-2021, 07:25 AM)phillbush Wrote: Let's also vote for the next book.

I'd vote for The Art of UNIX Programming, I've read it a really long time ago and I feel like I would need to revisit it.
Second place would go for The Design of the UNIX Operating System.

UNIX: A History and a Memoir is a pretty great book but not terribly technical compared to the others. It's also probably the only one I can grok :P So don't listen to me.

The Art of UNIX Programming and UNIX: A History and a Memoir are the two books from the list that I want to read. I'll vote for TAOUP, since it is free. (I don't know if people here are willing to buy Kernighan's book (or pirate it)). We can do the Memoir or The Design of the UNIX Operating System next.

The next Book Club book will be The Art of UNIX Programming. We can do Kernighan's next.

The Wayland book is IMO the best starting point at understanding how Wayland works.
It explains all the concepts of wayland from the ground up, which is extremely valuable. My main problem with it is that it is only set toward Wayland clients, and the compositor side is considered "out of scope". It's unfortunate because that was the part I was mostly interested in, which was really frustrating. I'm however glad that I read it, because even if it's client oriented, it goes a long way at explaining the main concepts.

Such a shame it was never finished… But given how modular the Wayland protocol is, it is hard to explain concepts out of the main interfaces (eg, clipboard, XDG shells, …).

Definitely worth a read for anyone digging into Wayland !