Arcan on NetBSD

pfr

While I was reading through @nia 's blog post about wayland on NetBSD, i noticed the last commenter (Leo) make reference to Arcan.

Leo says:

Maybe you better try Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/), it already officially supports Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, and uses their respective native input systems (evdev, syscons and wscons), so porting it should be trivial and of course you can run both X11 and Wayland clients in it with Xarcan and Waybridge (Xwayland support included), also its window managers are written in Lua while Arcan itself is written in C

I like the look of Arcan and it sounds interesting. I just wonder, it there any scope to include it in NetBSD at any point? What are people's thoughts on it?

qik

This Arcan stuff goes way over my head. I can't tell if it offers anything better than X/Wayland or if it would solve any problem for me. The project would benefit from a better presentation of its selling points. Other than allegedly being easier to port, what improvements would it bring?

pfr I just wonder, it there any scope to include it in NetBSD at any point?

I see there is a WIP package, have you tried it?

nia

Incredibly burned out from working on this

pfr

nia Are you talking about wayland on NetBSD or Arcan specifically?

I take it you didn't haven't much help with it judging by your comment? Sorry to hear that. From what I can tell though you laid the groundwork with swc so thanks for your efforts and great work 👍️

EDIT: s/have/haven't 🤦‍♂️

pfr

qik I see there is a WIP package, have you tried it?

Haven't yet no. TBH, I wouldn't have a clue what I'm doing. I just hear about it now and then and from what I hear it sounds like a shiny new thing that I must have.

The first time i ever heard of it was when I saw these cool WM projects using arcan:

Pipeworld
Durden

These are just plain cool and I'd love to try out Pipeworld WM.

20-100

The About page says it's a "powerful development framework", so probably not what @pfr is looking for. I had never heard about it before, which is not surprising - the least we can say is there's no shortage of powerful development frameworks on this planet... The latest news on the home page suggests Arcan more specifically targets embedded systems, which may also be an explanation.