Inter-client surface embedding

[Bill Spitzak]

On 02/19/2014 02:42 AM, Pekka Paalanen wrote:

> Besides, it's not that much code, really. clients/nested.c is 1140
> lines, and that includes support for EGL-passthrough so that
> nested-client.c can efficiently use GLES rendering.

Sample code like this does help a lot.

I would still be worried that a client is going to screw up support for 
something that does not work on that developer's machine, for instance 
EGL does not work on mine, or some complex synchronization protocol. It 
is not clear if there is some kind of generic wayland message so the 
subcompositor client can just pass messages both ways without really 
understanding them.

>> For my purposes I don't plan to resolve this.  I'm going to make a
>> mate-panel-specific pair of interfaces that are used by mate-panel and
>> libmatepanelapplet respectively, and not worry about the interactive
>> resize issue because you can't interactively resize panels.
>
> A wise decision. :-)

I am still worried that he prefers writing a shell plugin over writing a 
client program because of this. It seems like we may end up with a lot 
of shell plugins for reasons users do not understand. If subcompositors 
are the way to go then this should be addressed so that people are 
encouraged to use them.