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Comment by cnity | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it was considered to submit this as a dwm patch instead.

An X window manager and a Wayland compositor are so radically different beasts that it would probably require a monumental refactor of DWM to make it capable of having an X back-end and a wlroots back-end. Probably easier to just re-create DWM's interface on top of wlroots, like what Sway did with i3.

Also, DWM has an explicit goal of being minimal and to not grow too big. There's no way in hell that Suckless would accept a patch which makes the code way more complex and over 2x larger to make DWM work as a Wayland compositor.

Suspect you're right, from Acknowledgements:

    dwl began by extending the TinyWL example provided (CC0) by the sway/wlroots developers. This was made possible in many cases by looking at how sway accomplished something, then trying to do the same in as suckless a way as possible.

Why did you get downvoted?

i think fork was the correct approach -- it was written in such a way that many of the popular dwm patches can be applied cleanly to dwl.

(i used dwl for quite a while. strong recommend.)

It's not really a fork in any meaningful sense, because rewriting dwm (or any other X11 WM) to Wayland means re-doing almost all code. A "dmw with Wayland" would basically be "if (x11) { x11_code() } else { wayland_code() }".

yeah, by "fork" i really just meant "separate repo". you're right.

> it was written in such a way that many of the popular dwm patches can be applied cleanly to dwl.

That is very nice!

Implementation difference is so big that is makes no sense. Also, Wayland support is obviously out of scope for dwm.

I guess people downvoting this don't get the joke?

What's the joke?

dwm and the community around it tend to use patches for absolutely everything, unlike most other projects. For most projects/codebases, maintaining patch sets is done for security, customizations, etc., but rarely are users expected to configure their window manager by modifying the source code. dwm is well known for being very minimalist, with many features people would expect from other window managers not being included out of the box. To get something more fully featured, users are meant to cobble together their own version of dwm with multiple patches. I'm not saying this workflow doesn't work for dwm and other suckless software projects, it's just that it's pretty out of the ordinary.

So, having some experience with the project and how different x and wayland are, when I saw this commenter had brought up the idea of making the switch from x to wayland a patch, it made me laugh out loud. The idea of leaning even further into the borderline degenerate amount of patching already done with suckless software to the point where you're practically rewriting the majority of it was very funny, and so I was confused about the downvotes.

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