After this quick one I was all excited, “hey this works way too well”. Time to become skeptical. But first let’s jump into the wonderful world of KDE/Qt5. Porting QtWayland, KWayland and plasma-framework with Wayland enabled much easier than thought. I figured even if this whole Wayland construct doesn’t work, fine, just resolving the dependencies is enough for me to port the KDE Plasma Desktop to OpenBSD.

At the point where I wanted to build KWin and SWAY I saw the full extent of the horror. Wayland is a drop in the bucket, we need to port the following libraries/applications:

libinput
libudev
libevdev

When I read udev in the context of OpenBSD, my stomach turns. Welcome to the rabbit hole, welcome to hell.

But there seems to be a way out, a shortcut? Maybe: devd(8) from FreeBSD. If we could port devd to OpenBSD or replicate functionality we would have a good chance. We would have that the possibilities to port libudev-devd. This could solve the missing udev problem under OpenBSD, which would be very helpful for porting all other new stuff.

It would be worth a try, wouldn’t it?