Getting a compositor display name?

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Tue, 12 Nov 2019 12:59:40 -0700
"Ronan Pigott" <rpigott314 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> So EWMH has this thing "_NET_SUPPORTING_WM_CHECK":
> 
> https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.3.html#idm140130317670464
> 
> where the WM maintains a special window with some atoms for
> introspecting the running wm, including a suitable display name in
> _NET_WM_NAME, like "i3".
> 
> I'm wondering if there is anything similar in wayland for compositors to
> export a suitable display name such as "sway" or "myfirstcompositor"?
> 
> I thought that maybe there'd be a such a request in wl_compositor, but
> it doesn't appear so. Am I looking in the right place?
> 
> I think it could be useful for system-info type applications, but I
> don't know of any that support a more sophisticated method of getting a
> compositors display name than grepping ps.

Hi,

such thing has not been added, basically because no-one has provided a
convincing use case for it. System-info might be a convincing use case.

However, my fear with adding such information is that then clients
might start adding conditional code paths based on the Wayland
compositor name or version, which is an incorrect approach. Client
behaviour that depends on the particular compositor must be keyed by
the available global Wayland interfaces and their versions, not by the
compositor identity.

OTOH, Wayland is a few years old by now and developers should have
learnt better, so maybe that fear is no longer relevant.


Thanks,
pq
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