1What is Wayland?
2
3Wayland is a project to define a protocol for a compositor to talk to
4its clients as well as a library implementation of the protocol.  The
5compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel
6modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland
7client itself.  The clients can be traditional applications, X servers
8(rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers.
9
10The wayland protocol is essentially only about input handling and
11buffer management.  The compositor receives input events and forwards
12them to the relevant client.  The clients creates buffers and renders
13into them and notifies the compositor when it needs to redraw.  The
14protocol also handles drag and drop, selections, window management and
15other interactions that must go through the compositor.  However, the
16protocol does not handle rendering, which is one of the features that
17makes wayland so simple.  All clients are expected to handle rendering
18themselves, typically through cairo or OpenGL.
19
20The weston compositor is a reference implementation of a wayland
21compositor and the weston repository also includes a few example
22clients.
23
24Building the wayland libraries is fairly simple, aside from libffi,
25they don't have many dependencies:
26
27    $ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland
28    $ cd wayland
29    $ meson build/ --prefix=PREFIX
30    $ ninja -C build/ install
31
32where PREFIX is where you want to install the libraries.  See
33https://wayland.freedesktop.org for more complete build instructions
34for wayland, weston, xwayland and various toolkits.
35