Collaboration on standard Wayland protocol extensions

[Drew DeVault]

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