Cagebreak: A Wayland Tiling Compositor Inspired by Ratpoison

This is Cagebreak, a Wayland tiling compositor. The goal of this project is to provide a successor to ratpoison for Wayland users. However, this is no reimplementation of ratpoison. Should you like to know if a feature will be implemented, open an issue or get in touch with the development team.

This README is only relevant for development resources and instructions. For a description of Cagebreak and installation instructions for end-users, please see the man page supplied in the man/ directory and the Wiki.

Cagebreak is based on Cage, a Wayland kiosk compositor.

Experimenting with Cagebreak

Cagebreak is currently being developed under arch linux and uses the libraries as they are obtained through pacman. However, cagebreak should also work on other distributions given the proper library versions.

You can build Cagebreak with the meson build system. It requires wayland, wlroots and xkbcommon to be installed. Note that Cagebreak is developed against the latest tag of wlroots, in order not to constantly chase breaking changes as soon as they occur.

Simply execute the following steps to build Cagebreak:

$ meson build
$ ninja -C build

Release Build

By default, this builds a debug build. To build a release build, use meson build --buildtype=release.

Xwayland Support

Cagebreak comes with compile-time support for XWayland. To enable this, first make sure that your version of wlroots is compiled with this option. Then, add -Dxwayland=true to the meson command above. Note that you'll need to have the XWayland binary installed on your system for this to work.

Running Cagebreak

You can start Cagebreak by running ./build/cagebreak. If you run it from within an existing X11 or Wayland session, it will open in a virtual output as a window in your existing session. If you run it in a TTY, it'll run with the KMS+DRM backend. For more configuration options, see the man pages.

Contributing to Cagebreak

Cagebreak is currently developed to fit the needs of its creators. Should you desire to implement a feature, please let us know in advance by opening an issue. However, the feature set is intentionally limited (i.e. we removed support for a desktop background) and will continue to be so in the future.

Nonetheless, don't be intimidated by the (slightly lengthy) release checklist or any other part of this file. Do what you can, open an issue and we will collaborate toward a solution.

GCC and -fanalyzer

Cagebreak should be buildable with any reasonably new gcc or clang. Consider a gcc version of at least 10.1 if you want to get the benefit of the brand-new -fanalyzer flag. However, this new flag sometimes produces false-postives and we selectively disable warnings for affected code segments as described below.

Meson is configured to set CG_HAS_FANALYZE if -fanalyzer is available. Because we also compile with clang for fuzzing, please use the following preprocessor statements before

#if CG_HAS_FANALYZE
#pragma GCC diagnostic push
#pragma GCC diagnostic ignored "WARNING OPTION"
#endif

and after

#if CG_HAS_FANALYZE
#pragma GCC diagnostic pop
#endif

the offending part of the code iff the warning is a false positive.

Branching strategy

All features are to be developed on feature branches, named after the feature.

There exists a branch development to which all reasonable feature branches are merged for final testing.

Once development is ready for a release, meaning that the release checklist is fulfilled, it is merged into master, creating a new release, which is tagged and signed.

Merging into master is always done by

git checkout development
git pull origin development
git checkout master
git merge --squash development
git tag -u keyid version HEAD
git tag -v version
git push --tags origin master

and a log message roughly describing the features added in the commit.

In the past, our git history did not always reflect this scheme.

Releases

Release checklist

• Cursory testing
  • libfuzzer testing
• ninja -C build clang-format
• Version Number
  • meson.build
  • git tag
  • man pages
• Relevant Documentation
  • New features documented
    • man page
    • wiki
  • New configuration documented
    • man page
    • wiki
  • Changelog in README
  • Document fixed bugs in Bugs.md
  • Update hashes of the binary
  • Update signature of the binary
• Signature
• Branching Strategy

Signing Key

All releases are signed by at least one of the following collection of keys.

• E79F6D9E113529F4B1FFE4D5C4F974D70CEC2C5B
• 4739D329C9187A1C2795C20A02ABFDEC3A40545F

Should we at any point retire a key, we will only replace it with keys signed by at least one of the above collection.

Should we at any point have official mail addresses, their keys will be signed by a valid key noted above.

The full public keys can be found in keys/ along with any revocation certificates.

Reproducible Builds

Cagebreak offers reproducible builds given the exact library versions specified in meson.build. Should a version mismatch occur, a warning will be emitted. We have decided on this compromise to allow flexibility and security. In general we will adapt the versions to the packages available under arch linux at the time of release.

Reproducible Build Instructions

All hashes and signatures are provided for the following build instructions.

meson build -Dxwayland=true --buildtype=release
ninja -C build

Hashes for Builds

For every release after 1.0.5, hashes will be provided.

1.2.0

• sha 256: b3c6135833001a0ef600ea9628cca11f4130a524ebe748929d8f7bad034f2bf0
• sha 512: c044a086a9f65b0d27d05e2f12a20fe5d77386fc5682991c13a1894a84804bcd337c9167235869661d6e6581133521bd710ef2330066a5d2e2703d1630042f3f

1.1.0

• sha 256: fc393e225c549f893b9e21e8b904e546d5857bac1d905b3d26334c8f8a1cda11
• sha 512: 8b94b1069e767202bcab087cb592eadc42f0453d17ee119d48760be00bc66278cf0fa60bb09308d30cb551df6a7a3e26e2ab8b29c04f0e953cc6906542cd2d6f

1.0.6

• sha 256: 712ae9a8f17a9e589e108f0d503da203cc5eaf1c4a6ca6efb5b4c83b432ce0b8
• sha 512: d574003023a00cfd6623aac986a5a7f397cfd0bc9114017629a8c72731b0df3977c4a31768502dfa8a6607be06930089b2ccf6ffca9b5bcd1096b7ca0aede226

GPG Signatures

For every release after 1.0.5, a GPG signature will be provided in signatures.

The current signature is called cagebreak.sig, whereas all older signatures will be named after their release version.

Fuzzing

Along with the project source code, a fuzzing framework based on libfuzzer is supplied. This allows for the testing of the parsing code responsible for reading the cagebreak configuration file. When libfuzzer is available (please use the clang compiler to enable it), building the fuzz-testing software can be enabled by passing -Dfuzz=true to meson. This generates a build/fuzz/fuzz-parse binary according to the libfuzzer specifications. Further documentation on how to run this binary can be found here.

Here is an example workflow:

rm -rf build
CC=clang meson build -Dfuzz=true -Db_sanitize=address,undefined -Db_lundef=false
ninja -C build/
mkdir build/fuzz_corpus
cp examples/config build/fuzz_corpus/
WLR_BACKENDS=headless ./build/fuzz/fuzz-parse -jobs=12 -max_len=50000 -close_fd_mask=3 build/fuzz_corpus/

You may want to tweak -jobs or add other options depending on your own setup. We have found code path discovery to increase rapidly when the fuzzer is supplied with an initial config file. We are working on improving our fuzzing coverage to find bugs in other areas of the code.

Bugs

For any bug, please create an issue on GitHub.

Fixed bugs are to be assigned a number and summarized inside Bugs.md for future reference independent of github, in case this service is unavailable.

Changelog

Release 1.0.0

Adds basic tiling window manager functionality to cage.

Release 1.1.0

Unifies commands and actions. See Issue 4 in Bugs.md.

Release 1.2.0

Adds output configuration as described in the man pages.

License

Please see LICENSE