Hi all!

This month, two large patch series have been merged into wlroots! The first one is toplevel capture, which will allow tools such as grim and xdg-desktop-portal-wlr to capture the contents of a specific window. The wlroots side is super simple because wlroots just sends an event when a client requests to capture a toplevel. Producing frames for a particular toplevel from scratch would be pretty cumbersome to implement for a compositor, so wlroots also exposes a helper to create a capture source from an arbitrary scene-graph node. The compositor can pass the toplevel’s scene-graph node to this helper to implement toplevel capture. This is pretty flexible and leaves a lot of freedom to the compositor, making it easy to customize the capture result and to add support other kinds of capture targets! This also handles well popups (which need a composition step) and off-screen toplevels (which would otherwise stop rendering). The grim and xdg-desktop-portal-wlr side are not ready yet, but hopefully they shouldn’t be too much work. Still missing are cursors and a using a fully transparent background color (right now the background is black).

The other large patch series is color management support (part 1 was merged a while back, part 2, part 3 and part 4 just got merged). This was very challenging because one needs to learn a lot about colors before even understanding how color management should be implemented from a high-level architectural point-of-view. Sway isn’t quite ready yet, we’re missing one last piece of the puzzle to finish up the scene-graph integration. Thanks a lot to Kenny Levinsen, M. Stoeckl and Félix Poisot for going through this big pile of patches and spotting all of the bugs!

Sway 1.11 finally got released, with all of the wlroots 0.19 niceties. I’ve also started the Wayland 1.24 release cycle, hopefully the final release can go out very soon. Speaking of releases, I’ve cut libdrm 2.4.125 with updated kernel headers, an upgraded CI and a GitLab repository rename (“drm” was very confusing and got mixed up with the kernel side). Last, drm_info 2.8.0 adds Apple and MediaTek format modifiers and support for the IN_FORMATS_ASYNC property (contributed by Intel).

David Turner has contributed three optimization patches for libliftoff, with more in the pipeline. Leandro Ribeiro and Sebastian Wick have upstreamed libdisplay-info support for HDR10+ and Dolby Vision vendor-specific video blocks, with HDMI, HDMI Forum and HDMI Forum Sink Capability on the way (yes, these are all separate blocks!).

I’ve migrated the wayland-devel mailing list to a new server powered by Mailman 3 and public-inbox. The old Mailman 2 setup has started showing its age more than a decade ago, and it was about time we started a migration. I’ve started making plans for migrating other mailing lists, hopefully we’ll be able to decommission Mailman 2 in the coming months. Next we’ll need to migrate the postfix server over too, but one step at a time.

delthas has plumbed replies and reactions in Goguma’s compact mode. I’ve taken some time to clean up soju’s docs: the Getting started page has been revamped, the contrib/ directory has an index page, and man pages are linkified on the website. Let me know if you have ideas to improve our docs further!

As part of $dayjob I took part of Hackdays 2025, a hackathon organized by DINUM to work on La Suite (open-source productivity software). With my team, we worked on adding support for importing Notion documents into Docs. It was great meeting a lot of European open-source enthusiasts, and I hope our work can eventually be merged!

Phew, this status update ended up being larger than I expected! Perhaps thanks to getting the wlroots and Sway releases out of the way, and spending less time on triaging issues and investigating bugs. Perhaps thanks to a lot of stuff getting merged, after slowly accumulating and growing patches for months. Either way, see you next month for another status update!