[xmonad] WaylandMonad

[Auke Booij]

A few weeks ago, I sent in a Google Summer of Code application for the
haskell.org organization to work on porting Xmonad to wayland. The
haskell organization has asked me to find a mentor for my application,
which is the main reason for this email.

If you are
1. an adult (sorry kids, Google's rules)
2. experienced with the Xmonad source
3. interested in wayland
4. willing to spend some time this summer on mentoring me
then please contact me or someone in the haskell community to discuss
mentoring options. The deadline for proposal matching is the 24th of
April, so please contact me within this week (or better yet, as soon
as possible).

Without a mentor, I cannot get accepted for GSoC. I am already up to
speed on wayland, so I think any Xmonad developer with some free time
would make a great mentor.

I attached my GSoC application below.

Any comment on making Xmonad work on wayland is welcome as well. My
current plan is to fork Xmonad and replace all the X bits by wayland
bits - see also my proposal below.

Greetings,
Auke.


Abstract
===
XMonad has, for a long time, been a flagship product of the Haskell
community. With the arrival of wayland, XMonad is bound to look stuck
in the past, and it's time for a port. Thanks to my previous work on
wayland-related haskell libraries, this is now a viable project.

Proposal
===

Background
---
X11 has long been the de facto standard way for applications to
display graphical user interfaces on the screen. For various reasons,
a new project called wayland has been started, that can be seen as a
successor of the X ecosystem, or at least can be seen as something
that will play a very important role. Among others, GNOME is already
working on wayland support, and plans to make it fully supported by
version 3.18. This shows the relevance of wayland.

XMonad is a flagship product of the Haskell community that is often
cited as an example of the applicability of Haskell: its real world
value. XMonad is a compositor (aka window manager) for the X11
ecosystem.

In the new wayland ecosystem, one cannot reuse X11 compositors: they
need to be partially rewritten.

Goal
---
I intend to fork XMonad and make it into a wayland compositor. Since
the general ideas behind the X11 and the wayland protocol are not too
different, this should be doable: we are still working with pointers
and windows and input and output and renderings and messages. However,
the wayland setup is technically very different from X11, since the
central X11 server has been replaced by the compositor itself, and
this means some very foundational code will need to be rewritten.

I am the author of hayland [1], the haskell bindings to the wayland C
library, as well as haskell-xkbcommon [2], the haskell bindings to the
xkbcommon C library. With these two projects in place, the time is
ripe for a wayland compositor written in haskell: the preliminaries
are mostly there.

As part of this project, I will have to invest some time in these two
bindings projects as well (since they are quite new and have had
little testing). For this reason, I intend to keep the scope of this
project limited, and focus on getting some version of XMonad running
on Wayland.

I do not intend to change the architecture of XMonad, except wherever
this would not require much more investment of time, and only as
wished by the community. In other words: if you have anything that I
should change about XMonad, and it is easy to switch to this new
thing, then I'll use it. Any serious architectural changes will need
to take place in a later stage.

Deliverables
---
- A working wayland compositor written in wayland, based on XMonad
- Documentation of the source code (i.e. a technical document), user
documentation (where this differs from XMonad)
- Roadmap for further work: how should this project be continued into
a next iteration of the XMonad project?

Roadmap
---
April/May: properly work my way through the XMonad source, and
document things that will need changing

June: Hack until it's working

June+July: More hacking, also documentation

August: Prepare a proper release, clean up code

Bio
---
I am currently studying for a Master of Logic in Amsterdam, and have a
Master of Advanced Studies in Mathematics from Cambridge, UK, a BSc in
Applied Mathematics and a BSc in Electrical Engineering (both from TU
Delft).

I have previously successfully finished GSoC (2010, with Gentoo) and
SOCIS (in 2013, with PyBRML) (SOCIS is a GSoC-like program managed by
the European Space Agency).

I am the author of hayland [1], the haskell bindings to the wayland C
library, as well as haskell-xkbcommon [2], the haskell bindings to the
xkbcommon C library.



The name of this fork is up for discussion.

[1] https://github.com/tulcod/haskell-wayland

[2] https://github.com/tulcod/haskell-xkbcommon