It was announced today that the Wayland protocol is now done. Wayland being the up and coming replacement for Xorg this poses a challenge for KDocker.
KDocker uses X11, Xpm, and Xmu specifically to manipulate and dock windows. While Wayland is supposed to provide an X compatibility layer as we all know about compatibility layers they are often incomplete (especially when you start talking about complex parts) and eventually they go away.
From what I understand of the architecture (I could be wrong because I haven’t followed Wayland very closely) it makes applications like KDocker impossible. Basically my understanding is that the functionality KDocker provides would need to be integrated into the window manager itself or possibly Wayland itself.
At this point KDocker needs two real updates. 1) Move to Qt5. 2) Replace the QtSolution single application with something like D-Bus (a modern alternative). Number 1 is easy. Number 2 isn’t so easy. That said if in a year KDocker is no longer viable due to distros switching to Wayland, it doesn’t make sense to put work into either.
So, the questions are, is KDocker viable in Wayland? Is it worth the effort of implementing 1 or 2? Does Wayland mean KDocker is dead?. These are all issues I need to investigate before moving forward with the project. Most likely I’ll update it for Qt5 and if it doesn’t work with Wayland then stop there and KDocker is dead. Luckily there is less need for an application like KDocker now a days especially with changes in how people interact with their desktop (Gnome3, and Unity for example).