Collaboration on standard Wayland protocol extensions

[Peter Hutterer]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 05:37:10PM +0200, Benoit Gschwind wrote:
> Hello Drew,
> 
> After reading the thread stream, I think there is two mixed questions in
> your email that is missleading. And most reply try to address both in
> one reply. I thing Daniel get the point (if I understood him well).
> 
> I read the two following questions:
> 
> [1] As almost all compositor will need the following features:
> - Screen capture
> - Output configuration
> - More detailed surface roles (should it be floating, is it a modal,
>   does it want to draw its own decorations, etc)
> - Input device configuration.
> 
> It would be nice if we go around a table to define some shared protocol.
> For those interested I will start writing an XML spec. you are welcome
> to contribute.

I'm mostly talking about the input device configuration here but an XML is
the wrong place to start, imo. As I said above, it won't add anything much
and you still have to do the implementation everywhere. The only meaningful
thing you can do is write a library that compositors *want* to use that
reads the configuration items from some magic place and applies them to the
libinput device.

and for those that must be handled in the compostior (key remappings, for
example) you'll essentially end up writing a libcompositorinput. but now
you're quite close to internal compositor semantics so making this a generic
thing is not going to be trivial.

Cheers,
   Peter

> 
> [2] This features are mandatory and should be in the core protocol.
> 
> 
> If my reading is correct, I reply to [1]:
> 
> I'm in, I would like to avoid implements tools that setup screen layout,
> keymaping and screen capture. Thus having a protocol to handle those
> case is welcome. From my point of view of WM developer (in opposition of
> DE developer)
> 
> 
> For [2], I suggest that you starting with not-adopted protocol
> specification and if they gather enough approval, you try to push it as
> _optionnal_ standard protocol. By optionnal I mean the compositor
> developer can choose to implement it or not. by standard I mean if a
> developer want implement those feature we strongly encouraged developper
> to use them instead of providing a new one.
> 
> Best regards.
> 
> --
> Benoit (blocage) Gschwind
> 
> Le 27/03/2016 22:34, Drew DeVault a écrit :
> > Greetings! I am the maintainer of the Sway Wayland compositor.
> > 
> > http://swaywm.org
> > 
> > It's almost the Year of Wayland on the Desktop(tm), and I have
> > reached out to each of the projects this message is addressed to (GNOME,
> > Kwin, and wayland-devel) to collaborate on some shared protocol
> > extensions for doing a handful of common tasks such as display
> > configuration and taking screenshots. Life will be much easier for
> > projects like ffmpeg and imagemagick if they don't have to implement
> > compositor-specific code for capturing the screen!
> > 
> > I want to start by establishing the requirements for these protocols.
> > Broadly speaking, I am looking to create protocols for the following
> > use-cases:
> > 
> > - Screen capture
> > - Output configuration
> > - More detailed surface roles (should it be floating, is it a modal,
> >   does it want to draw its own decorations, etc)
> > - Input device configuration
> > 
> > I think that these are the core protocols necessary for
> > cross-compositor compatability and to support most existing tools for
> > X11 like ffmpeg. Considering the security goals of Wayland, it will also
> > likely be necessary to implement some kind of protocol for requesting
> > and granting sensitive permissions to clients.
> > 
> > How does this list look? What sorts of concerns do you guys have with
> > respect to what features each protocol needs to support? Have I missed
> > any major protocols that we'll have to work on? Once we have a good list
> > of requirements I'll start writing some XML.
> > 
> > --
> > Drew DeVault
> > _______________________________________________
> > wayland-devel mailing list
> > wayland-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> > https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel
> > 
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