new xwayland protocol

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2012 10:36:53 +0200
Andreas Ericsson <ae at op5.se> wrote:

> On 09/14/2012 08:40 AM, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
> > On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:27:50 -0700
> > Bill Spitzak <spitzak at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> My recommendation is to give up on useless "purity" and make Wayland
> >> clients be able to get and set the exact x/y coordinates of their surfaces.
> > 
> > Apparently you have forgot all about, say, dome projectors or virtual
> > displays, where the output is a half sphere. Good luck mapping Cartesian
> > global coordinates there in any meaningful way.
> > 
> > I'm not making virtual displays up, btw. I have been explaining Wayland
> > to someone who is researching just that.
> > 
> 
> While it's a good idea to be able to support minority use cases like that,
> I don't think it's a very good idea to do it in a way that makes wayland
> less useful for a far greater audience.

I have not yet seen a single case where it really makes Wayland less
useful. People complain about missing features. These features are
missing, because no-one has yet had the time to implement them, not
because they are impossible. People are also very stuck with how X does
things, since X has been there forever. They attempt to apply the same
methods to Wayland, fail, and complain that Wayland is wrong.

> Most of us have plain rectangular
> screens, and I pretty much like having my applications open up where they
> were last, or at the place where I tell them to. Ideally windows would
> move further up and to the left if the desired window size is greater than
> the area where we're supposed to draw it. That would make things behave
> properly when moving from an external screen to the internal one on a
> laptop.

The problems you mention are not related to exposing global coordinate
systems to clients. These are just unimplemented features and
unspecified protocol. I'm sure they will be implemented, without every
application or toolkit reinventing the way to store current position
etc. like it is (is it?) on X.

That said, if there really are cases where global coordinates are
needed to make things work, then yes, I guess they will be exposed. So
far that has been limited to very special cases, and I suppose we try
hard to keep it that way.


Thanks,
pq