Suggestions on implementing Wayland Protocol Dumper.

[Bryce W. Harrington]

On Mon, Jun 09, 2014 at 11:17:20AM +0530, Srivardhan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The following are the ways in which a Protocol Dumper can be implemented:
> 1. Just before sending a message or when a message is received, the message
> can be written to a file. This change can be done in libwayland under #ifdef
> DEBUG. So when built enabling DEBUG, we should get all the protocol
> messages.
> 2. We can introduce another layer in Weston for monitoring. This layer would
> act as Man in the middle. This layer would listen to a socket to which all
> the Wayland clients would attach and this layer would in turn attach to the
> server socket. This layer would print the messages it received from the
> client and would transfer to the server and vise a versa. This could be
> included in #ifdef DEBUG, so that it is enabled only in DEBUG builds.
> 
> I feel the 1st approach is simpler, What are your thoughts?

When I worked at Canonical, us X guys would periodically get called on
to help troubleshoot issues where a client app was getting an X11 error,
and needed to utilize xtrace to identify the protocol error.  In some
cases this debugging was done on production or embedded hardware where
we couldn't quite so easily recompile or reinstall X, and in one case
was with commercial software for which we didn't have source access.  So
for this use case, having the protocol dumper configurable as a separate
(packaged and pre-compiled) application was advantageous.

So, while #1 does indeed sound simpler, based on experience debugging
similar issues in X, I think #2 is going to prove more flexible in the
long term.

Bryce