Collaboration on standard Wayland protocol extensions

[Martin Peres]

On 27/03/16 23:34, Drew DeVault wrote:
> 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

We had discussions about it years ago and here are the results of them:
http://mupuf.org/blog/2014/02/19/wayland-compositors-why-and-how-to-handle/
http://mupuf.org/blog/2014/03/18/managing-auth-ui-in-linux/

And here is the software we created, under the name "Wayland Security 
Modules":
http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2014/XDC2014DodierPeresSecurity/xorg-talk.pdf
https://github.com/mupuf/libwsm

This approach has generally be liked by KDE, but not by Gnome who, last 
i heard, did not care about cross-platform apps doing privileged 
operations. This may have changed since they also decided to work on 
sandboxing (xdg-app) and implemented something like the following 
approach when they said they would never do because it changed the API:
http://mupuf.org/blog/2014/05/14/introducing-sandbox-utils-0-6-1/

I really wish we can have everyone onboard on one solution to get these 
cross-platform apps and so far, I do not see any better solution than WSM.

Martin