concerns over wayland and need for wayland app display to X Server

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,
There's already a Wayland session that runs on X, and as you asked
for, an X server that runs rootless on Wayland, with full and proper
integration with a Wayland session.  Hope this satisfies you.

Cheers,
Daniel

On 19 February 2012 22:04, David Jackson <djackson452 at gmail.com> wrote:
> When I initially heard of Wayland, my reaction was of great concern, for I
> was concerned that this could affect my network transparency use and my
> desire to have multiple desktop sessions on the same computer with a mix of
> local and remote apps displayed to them.
>
> If wayland can provide assurance of two critical features, the ability to on
> a runtime, per process basis select via a command line switch to display a
> Wayland native application to a local or remote X server, and the already
> planned feature to allow X applications to be displayed to Wayland, my
> concerns will be alleviated and I will have no concern over Wayland. The
> first feature of wayland app to X protocol may be able to be implemented by
> some glue code from wayland client API to xlib to send graphical data from
> the wayland native application onto an X server over X protocol.
>
> This feature is vitally important to me.
>
> Wayland should take it upon itself to gaurantee that this is possible and
> provide a standard mechanism to make it possible, perhaps a set of Wayland
> client side drivers can be made which would then send the graphics to a
> regular X server, and the driver could be selected at runtime on a per
> process basis. We should not count on widget or application developers to
> have to explicitely implement this feature but should be gauranteed by
> wayland itself, the reason is there are some shoddy developers who may not
> expicitely include such a feature, but it is important to make sure that all
> applications can be run on one computer and displayed to another, displayed
> to an X server, or that an application can be displayed to one of many local
> display server sessions, including local X servers such as Xvnc.  This
> should not be a problem as the driver for either display to X or display to
> wayland target could be linked at runtime perhaps (dynamic link).
>
> With the likelyhood that there could be many wayland apps which are native
> eventually and to avoid having to have two copies of each application
> installed, the above is a sensible and reasonable idea that would actually
> greatly assure the flexibility of wayland since dynamic linking or some
> other type of runtime client output driver loading would assure that the
> wayland system is flexible and that other kinds of output drivers could also
> be developed and added to a system without having to recompile any
> applications. This gives the system flexibility and modularity that can give
> it much more power.
>
> We have many computers which are legacy and have only X servers and it would
> be greatly beneficial that there will be a guarantee that future Native
> wayland apps can be displayed to it on a per app basis, such as through this
> idea that there could be a client side wayland driver that will send the
> graphics onto an X server over X protocol and that this driver can be
> selected at run time with a simple command line argument.
>
> The driver would probably be glue code between the wayland client API and
> the xlib API. This would allow a feature that would be critical to us to
> allow a single wayland app to be displayed to a X server, this would also
> give us network transparency as well as full backwards and forwards
> compatibility.
>
> The fact we have a network transparent desktop environment where apps are
> not tied to a single display and one can run multiple instance of an app on
> the same computer displaying to multiple display servers running on local
> machine and on remote machines has been one of the great strengths of Linux.
> The ability as well to create many headless X sessions which can then be
> accessed as needed by VNC clients (Xvnc. Xnest, Xvfb+x11vnc) is also of
> great value.
>
> The ability to display a native wayland app to an X server would basically
> assure these possibilities are available and that I will be able to continue
> to route my applications as needed to remote displays on other machines,
> would assure backward and forward compatibility, and give us full network
> transparency on the per application level, and allow for multiple local X
> desktop sessions to be able to remain a possibility whilst using native
> wayland applications displaying to the X servers.
>
>
>
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