wayland-protocols/GOVERNANCE.md

wayland-protocols governance

This document governs the maintenance of wayland-protocols and serves to outline the broader process for standardization of protocol extensions in the Wayland ecosystem.

1. Membership

Membership in wayland-protocols is offered to stakeholders in the Wayland ecosystem who have an interest in participating in protocol extension standardization.

1.1. Membership requirements

1. Membership is extended to projects, rather than individuals.
2. Member projects represent general-purpose projects with a stake in multiple Wayland protocols (e.g. compositors, GUI toolkits, etc), rather than special-purpose applications with a stake in only one or two.
3. Each member project must provide one or two named individuals as points-of-contact for that project who can be reached to discuss protocol-related matters.
4. During a vote, if two points-of-contact for the same member project disagree, the member project's vote is considered blank.

1.2. Becoming a member

1. New member projects who meet the criteria outlined in 1.1 are established by invitation from an existing member. Projects hoping to join should reach out to an existing member project or point of contact, asking for this invitation.
2. Prospective new member projects shall file a merge request tagged governance adding themselves to the list in MEMBERS.md, noting their sponsor member.
3. A point of contact for the sponsor member shall respond acknowledging their sponsorship of the membership.
4. A 14 day discussion period for comments from wayland-protocols members will be held.
5. At the conclusion of the discussion period, the new membership is established unless their application was NACKed by a 1/2 majority of all existing member projects.
6. Member projects may vary their point(s) of contact by proposing the addition and/or removal of points of contact in a merge request tagged governance, subject to approval as in points 4 and 5 above.

1.3. Ceasing membership

1. A member project, or point of contact, may step down by submitting a merge request tagged governance removing themselves from MEMBERS.md.
2. A removal vote may be called for by an existing member project or point of contact, by filing a merge request tagged governance, removing the specific member project or point of contact from MEMBERS.md. This begins a 14 day voting & discussion period.
3. At the conclusion of the voting period, the member is removed if the votes total 2/3rds of all current member projects.
4. Removed members are not eligible to apply for membership again for a period of 1 year.
5. Following a failed vote, the member project who called for the vote cannot call for a re-vote or propose any other removal for 90 days.

2. Protocols

2.1. Protocol namespaces

1. Namespaces are implemented in practice by prefixing each interface name in a protocol definition (XML) with the namespace name, and an underscore (e.g. "xdg_wm_base").
2. Protocols in a namespace may optionally use the namespace followed by a dash in the name (e.g. "xdg-shell").
3. The "xdg" namespace is established for protocols letting clients configure their surfaces as "windows", allowing clients to affect how they are managed.
4. The "wp" namespace is established for protocols generally useful to Wayland implementations (i.e. "plumbing" protocols).
5. The "ext" namespace is established as a general catch-all for protocols that fit into no other namespace.

2.2. Protocol inclusion requirements

1. All protocols found in the "xdg" and "wp" namespaces at the time of writing are grandfathered into their respective namespace without further discussion.
2. Protocols in the "xdg" and "wp" namespace are eligible for inclusion only if ACKed by at least 3 members.
3. Protocols in the "xdg" and "wp" namespace are ineligible for inclusion if NACKed by any member.
4. Protocols in the "xdg" and "wp" namespaces must have at least 3 open-source implementations (either 1 client + 2 servers, or 2 clients + 1 server) to be eligible for inclusion.
5. Protocols in the "ext" namespace are eligible for inclusion only if ACKed by at least 2 member projects.
6. Protocols in the "ext" namespace must have at least one open-source client & one open-source server implementation to be eligible for inclusion.
7. "Open-source" is defined as distributed with an Open Source Initiative approved license.
8. All protocols are eligible for inclusion only if formally reviewed in-depth by at least one member project. For the purposes of this clause, reviews from the individual protocol author(s) are disregarded.

2.3. Introducing new protocols

1. A new protocol may be proposed by submitting a merge request to the wayland-protocols Gitlab repository.
2. Protocol proposal posts must include justification for their inclusion in their namespace per the requirements outlined in section 2.2.
3. An indefinite discussion period for comments from wayland-protocols members will be held, with a minimum duration of 30 days. Protocols which require a certain level of implementation status, ACKs from members, and so on, should use this time to acquire them.
4. When the proposed protocol meets all requirements for inclusion per section 2.2, and the minimum discussion period has elapsed, the sponsoring member may merge their changes into the wayland-protocol repository.
5. Amendments to existing protocols may be proposed by the same process, with no minimum discussion period.
6. Declaring a protocol stable may be proposed by the same process, with the regular 30 day minimum discussion period.

3. Amending this document

1. An amendment to this document may be proposed by any member project by submitting a merge request on Gitlab.
2. A 30 day discussion period for comments from wayland-protocols members will be held.
3. At the conclusion of the discussion period, an amendment will become effective if it's ACKed by at least 2/3rds of all wayland-protocols member projects, and NACKed by none. The sponsoring member may merge their change to the wayland-protocols repository at this point.