[wpe-webkit] Fate of wpebackend-rd and WpeLauncher

[Adrian Perez de Castro]

Hello Wouter,

On Mon, 17 Sep 2018 10:06:54 +0000, Vanhauwaert Wouter <W.Vanhauwaert at TELEVIC.com> wrote:
> > 	> wpebackend-fdo is added (doesn't have much idea on this)
> > 
> > 	The idea for the FDO backend is that the backend does not “talk”
> > directly to
> > 	the display. Instead, it tries to be generic and provides a mechanism
> > to
> > 	notify the launcher when a frame has been rendered. Then the
> > launcher can
> > 	use the method it prefers to display the frames. In theory it should be
> > 	possible to replace many backends with the FDO one, but not much
> > has been
> > 	done on that front.
> > Sorry , I couldnt get it.  Is FDO a replacement for rdk backend or supplement.
> > And also what if i don't want to use wayland. For example RPI uses
> > Dispmanx. Can I use FDO + Dispmanx ?
> > This was possible with wpebackend-rdk where I could use RPI port without
> > wayland. I also saw there are some BCM ports which uses nexus instead of
> > wayland.
> > 
> > 
 
> I also want to elaborate a bit on the wpebackend-rdk story. I also don't
> know what the future will be or what the intentions here are. 
>
> A few weeks ago, I already made a pull request to adapt wpebackend-rdk
> to the new libwpe. It is able to run fine together, but it seemed nobody
> replied to my pull-request, and also it was not very clear what to use
> now, so I closed it again...
>    https://github.com/WebPlatformForEmbedded/WPEBackend-rdk/pull/26 

Sorry, somehow this PR went unnoticed under my radar, otherwise I would have
commented something on it. I'll take a look, but IMHO it seems like a good
idea to reopen it and continue the technical discussion there.

> I also don't use wayland, but using the egl vivante-backend (imx6)
> directly (just as bcm/rpi). It looks like all efforts go to wpebackend-fdo
> now?

The effort of us working *upstream* has indeed gone to the keep the FDO
backend well updated because it is what we use to run the WebKit test suite.
One of the many reasons behind working on the FDO backend was to be able to
use it for the test runner, because programs which use it can run headless
(due to the FDO backend not talking to video hardware at all).

On the other hand, my understanding is that, at the moment, the RDK backend is
mostly used by devices which are running Metrological's downstream WPE WebKit
fork, done at some point in late 2017 and that still has pre-2.20.x APIs (for
example the plain C API used by WpeLauncher). Personally, I would be delighted
to see the RDK backend updated to support WPE WebKit 2.22.x :-)

Best regards,


-Adrián
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