New paths for Wayland sockets (Re: Enabling Android-style per application user ids)

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Thu, 2 Nov 2017 10:07:28 -0500
Matt Hoosier <matt.hoosier at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 2, 2017 at 3:36 AM, Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 1 Nov 2017 13:44:50 -0500
> > Matt Hoosier <matt.hoosier at gmail.com> wrote:
> >  

> > >
> > > I'd like to call attention to another difficult point in using Wayland  
> > for  
> > > a device that acts more like a smartphone than a desktop: the main logic  
> > in  
> > > wl_display_connect() always attempts to contact a server socket living at
> > > ${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}.

Hi,

I rewrote the subject with the hope to raise more interest, being more
specific to the proposals.

> > I can also imagine that it may not be feasible to create
> > application-user specific sockets for everything, so there could be a
> > need for a common socket file somewhere that is not tied to
> > XDG_RUNTIME_DIR. With a good justification written down, I suspect that
> > would be fine. We just need to figure out the details on how to do that
> > exactly.
> >
> > Modifying the meaning of WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable to
> > support also absolute paths has been proposed before IIRC. Maybe
> > resurrecting that work could be a way forward? Can anyone see a problem
> > with that?
> >  
> 
> This would definitely work, so I don't object if this is the preference of
> other reviewers. I would prefer (for the reasons coming below) the
> /run/wayland/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY suggestion though.
> 
> One note about this: this would contain a subtle change in behavior to
> existing users of $WAYLAND_DISPLAY. If somebody sets
> WAYLAND_DISPLAY="/wayland-0" currently, this works okay. The concatenation
> logic in wl_display_connect() results in a string
> "/run/user/<uid>//wayland-0", which is valid despite the duplicate '/'. If
> $WAYLAND_DISPLAY is now examined for absolute-pathiness, the logic would
> probably see "/wayland-0" as an absolute path reference, and the connection
> attempt would fail.

While this is true, I don't think it is a blocker unless we find out
about tools or compositors doing so.


> >
> > The suggestion to automatically look for a fallback socket
> > at /run/wayland/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY with WAYLAND_DISPLAY defaulting to
> > "wayland-0" sounds reasonable to me, but I wouldn't feel comfortable
> > making that review decision alone. I do know some people are eager to
> > avoid mandatory environment variables if something can be found by
> > convention.
> >  
> 
> This would be my preference. The fewer tweaks to environment variables are
> required, the better in my opinion.

Right, so there is interest to both ideas, and I don't see them as
mutually exclusive. I believe one can also write a good justification
for each, so now I'd be looking for reasons why either might be
unwanted and acks for each, so that we get enough buy-in to "bless" the
behavioural change in libwayland-client.

People, give your acks/nacks for the two ideas, please:

- modify WAYLAND_DISPLAY to support absolute paths which overrides
  any search paths

- when the current socket search fails, add one more place to look
  in: /run/wayland/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY with the default "wayland-0" if
  WAYLAND_DISPLAY is not set.


The last proposed patch for absolute paths is probably
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2015-August/023838.html
which looks like it got ignored mostly because of a damaged submission
and mixed-up (nowadays probably unwanted) server-side changes. The
patch also lacks the rationale and justification in the commit message.
This is FYI for anyone wanting to carry on that work.


Thanks,
pq
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