[RFC wayland v2 0/2] Wayland protocol dumper

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2014 16:21:19 +0800
Boyan Ding <stu_dby at 126.com> wrote:

> The v2 of patches sees a lot of new code and the most notable change
> is the introduction of "server mode". Under server mode, the program
> will act as a wayland server and can accept multiple clients via
> WAYLAND_DISPLAY variable. An interesting usecase of this feature is to
> trace all clients of a compositor.
> 
> To make it run under server mode, run
> shell> wayland-tracer -S SOCKET_NAME
> SOCKET_NAME is a value like wayland-0 or so. If we set WAYLAND_DISPLAY
> environment variable to SOCKET_NAME and launch a wayland app, that app
> will be traced.
> 
> To make it run under default mode (now called "single mode"), run
> shell> wayland-tracer -- program arguments ...
> 
> Also, EPOLLHUP is handled correctly in this version.
> 
> The next step will be adding xml protocol parsing and wire data
> analysing according to protocol files. This will be much tougher but I
> hope I can finish that.
> 
> Boyan Ding (2):
>   connection: Move definitions
>   Add a wayland protocol dumper wayland-tracer
> 
>  .gitignore            |   1 +
>  Makefile.am           |  10 +
>  configure.ac          |   7 +
>  src/connection.c      |  18 +-
>  src/tracer.c          | 689 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  src/wayland-private.h |  18 +-
>  6 files changed, 727 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)
>  create mode 100644 src/tracer.c
> 

Hi,

excellent work! :-)

As I understand there are also other people writing protocol dumpers,
and I do not see any technical reason why it should live in the wayland
repository, I would suggest creating your own project. I believe it
will be much more comfortable for you, being in total control, not
having to rebase/merge and so on. This is also what I tried to refer to
with the "self-contained project" in my original call-out.

You can freely pick your dependencies and frameworks there, which is
not something you can easily do in the wayland repository.

It would also be nicer for your users, as they don't need two different
checkouts of libwayland, other one just for building the dumper.

In any case you are welcome to post news on your progress to
wayland-devel. A bit of competition might be insipiring, and I wouldn't
want to announce the winner on the starting line by merging this
too soon. :-)

I think you should rather duplicate than re-use the few bits from
libwayland internals, I feel that would be a cleaner approach and it's
not that much code anyway (is it?). You are free copy anything you need
from Wayland and Weston code bases under the given licence (don't
forget to copy the copyrights).

If all goes well and you are happy with the work, you could very soon be
running a FOSS project of your own! Or if you just want to develop this
once, push it upstream, and then move on, that is ok too. Or maybe
someone else would like to take over the project later. Do you have
plans in this regard?

I think your project should live for a while so we see where it is
going, and at least do the decoding with XML into text form before we
look into merging it into wayland repository. I think anything with a
GUI (which would be awesome!) is getting beyond the scope of the wayland
repository.


Thanks,
pq