Sharing a single wl_display (client) by multiple toolkits

Jaroslaw Kubik jarek at froglogic.com
Thu Mar 21 19:37:37 UTC 2019


Hi,

Does wayland-client support sharing a single connection object between
unrelated pieces of code? Such feature could be useful for integrating
multiple toolkits (ie. showing GTK widget in a Qt application). I am trying
to get something similar (but less spectacular) done at the moment, and
I am facing the following issue: When two unrelated pieces of code
(ie. GTK and Qt) use the same wl_display and both create a proxy to a
global object (ie. wl_output), then from the server perspective both these
proxies are indistinguishable. When sending events like wl_surface.enter,
the server has to pick a single wl_resource as an argument. That  wl_resource
is bound to a specific wl_output proxy on the client side. If the server 
chooses wrong, then the window created and managed by Qt will receive
wl_surface.enter event with wl_output proxy instance that belongs to GTK.
It will attempt to access it's user-data and crash because it's not the data
it is expecting.

In the above scenario the server has no way of knowing which of the proxies
are expected as parameters in any given case. And the client has no way of
"discovering" equivalent proxies in case it would like to straighten it out.
This leads me to believe that the design of the wayland protocol makes it
impossible to share a connection object between unrelated code and that
use-case is simply not supported.

Is that correct? Are there any plans to address this?

Best Regards,
Jaroslaw Kubik


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