[PATCH] protocol: replace the usage of selection with clipboard

[Bill Spitzak]

John Kåre Alsaker wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 7:32 PM, Bill Spitzak <spitzak at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Isn't Wayland differentiating between the "selection" and the clipboard?
> It is not doing that at the moment. Only explicit clipboard actions
> are supposed to be used.
> 
>> The selection is changed when the user selects an object.The clipboard is
>> changed only when the user does a cut or copy operation.
> There is no such thing as a selection in the Wayland protocol, even
> though things are named 'selection'. It actually just refers to the
> clipboard (or so I'm told).

In that case this patch makes sense.

>> There is also drag & drop. Though in most cases this can be the same as the
>> selection, I think there was some pathological examples showing that it has
>> to be it's own piece of data.
> Drag and drop is separate from the clipboard in the protocol.

I believe then that drag & drop can be used for x-style selection.

The idea is that a client can turn some action (such as a middle mouse 
click) into the same result as though the user dragged from a selected 
object and dropped at that point. Hopefully this can be done by reusing 
as much of the drag & drop api as possible.

I don't think it has to be any more complex than that. There is only one 
potential drag source (whichever client last said it was a drag source, 
there is no attempt to choose from many potential drag sources to find 
the correct data type). The clients on either end are aware that this is 
happening so they can disable it or make the result different from drag 
& drop, though making it identical is encouraged.

I do not believe that removing middle-mouse paste (or making it use the 
clipboard) will be acceptable to X users, so something MUST be done in 
Wayland.