Hi all,
----- Original Message -----
Yes, I commented in this bug.
Basically, imho, gnome-shell on Wayland is not worse than the X server on X11.
Wayland and X11 do not have the same architecture (if they did, I guess we would not need
need Wayland)
In X11, if the X server dies, the entire session goes along with it, whereas the window
manager is just an X11 client, so it can be restarted at will. When restarting the window
manager, the other X11 applications connected to the X server can continue to work as the
X server remains the same.
In Wayland, if the Wayland compositor dies, the entire session goes along with it. In
GNOME, gnome-shell is the window manager and the Wayland compositor, which means that
losing gnome-shell means losing the session, just like losing the X server means losing
the session in X11.
So indeed, you cannot restart gnome-shell in Wayland, it's pretty much by design, just
like you cannot restart weston if you use weston as your Wayland compositor.
But is being able to restart gnome-shell such an important feature? Isn't that a debug
(user hitting alt-f2 + "r", what's the real use case for that, in a normal,
regular user session?) - What matters more, imho, is that gnome-shell is robust enough so
that it doesn't crash.
Like any software, there can be bugs, just like the X server can have bugs as well and the
X server do crash at times, sometimes it's due to a bug in the Xserver, sometimes
it's a bug in one of the drivers, but the net result is basically the same, when that
occurs in X11, the user loses his/her entire session. I don't see gnome-shell/Wayland
being any worse than the Xserver on X11 in this regard. When bug occur, a bug is filed and
the developers do their best to fix it.
However, unlike weston, gnome-shell requires Xwayland to run, so losing Xwayland means
losing gnome-shell, which means losing the session. If we could get rid of this
requirement on Xwayland in gnome-shell, gnome-shell/mutter could possibly survive a crash
in Xwayland. That would be upstream bug
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=759538
but it's not trivial and requires quite a few changes in mutter as it still uses X11
heavily in multiple places.
Cheers,
Olivier.