Inter-client surface embedding

[Alex Elsayed]

Mark Thomas wrote:

> 
> As part of my current attempts to get MATE fully working on Wayland, I was
> planning to take a look at porting mate-panel this weekend.  However, I
> pretty quickly hit the first snag, which is that Gtk on Wayland doesn't
> support the GtkSocket/GtkPlug interface, which mate-panel relies heavily
> upon.

<snip, since I'm only addressing the most generic level of the need, rather 
than the implementation>

The question I find myself asking is "Do you really need a full-on surface 
to which you render arbitrarily?"

As I understand it, this is intended for the system-tray type use case, 
correct? Which generally has much simpler requirements in the common case, 
and the exceptional cases really do make more sense as shell plugins. Isn't 
that exactly what the proposed StatusNotifier[1] spec (which is used by KDE, 
I think Gnome as well, likely others) was intended to solve?

In particular, it was explicitly intended to get well clear of XEmbed 
precisely because of how horrid it was to deal with.

Because of the way it was designed, it should work with little-to-no 
modification, regardless of X11, Wayland, or anything else, so long as DBus 
is around.

[1] http://www.notmart.org/misc/statusnotifieritem/index.html