Limitations of Weston's screenshooter / Are there any plans to create an official screenshot protocol?

[Maarten Baert]

I'm trying to add Wayland support to a screen recording application, but
I'm running into a few issues:

- There is no official protocol. I'm using the weston-specific
'screenshooter' interface now, but I don't want to use a different
interface for every possible Wayland compositor in the future. Are there
any plans to create an official screenshot protocol?

- Permissions were an issue, but I hear this is being taken care of. The
current solution is to drop the restriction completely for all clients -
wouldn't it be safer to add a third mode where only local clients
running as the same user are allowed to capture the screen? I think this
mode would be more suitable for a typical Linux desktop (local
applications can already do far more damage in other ways).

- There is no way to take a screenshot of a part of the screen. Some
people only want to record a small area (usually one window), so it
would be a lot more efficient if I could capture only the part I need,
like I can do with X11.

- There is a potential race condition where the size of the output
changes after the application sends the screenshot request but before
the Wayland server receives the request. In this case the buffer would
be the wrong size. How does the compositor handle this? I would prefer
something similar to what glReadPixels does, i.e. capture the valid part
and make the remainder black, because this minimizes interruptions in
the video. From what I can tell, the current implementation will ignore
the screenshot request and never send the 'done' message, so the client
will hang (unless the client implements a timeout).

- The 'done' message doesn't tell the client whether the screenshot was
successful, or what screenshot request (output and/or buffer) it is
actually referring to. I don't think I can assume the screenshots will
complete in the same order as they were requested (in a multi-monitor
configuration).

- How does the compositor deal with rotated/mirrored screens? Most
applications won't care about the physical orientation of the screen,
they just want a screenshot where things on the screen (windows, text,
...) aren't rotated or upside down.

- Why can the protocol only capture one screen at a time? I expect this
will result in tearing because the screenshots won't correspond to the
same point in time. Can this be avoided somehow? I realize that
different outputs can have different pixel formats, but I thought
compositors used a single big surface for all of them anyway, making it
trivial to capture all of them at once.

I am not familiar with the Weston codebase, but I would like to help
where I can to add the thinks I need to add full Wayland support to my
application.

Maarten Baert