absolute positioning and other "missing features" of Wayland

[Dima Ryazanov]

Hi everyone,

I realize this has always been a controversial topic; I apologize for
bringing it up yet again, but I'm wondering if there could be some
compromise here.

I've been following the development of the Wayland driver for Wine [1] -
and it's one of the examples where "applications shouldn't know or care
about window positioning" doesn't really make sense. Wine is a
compatibility layer; it's not up to Wine what the application is trying to
do. Right now, properly supporting Wine on Wayland is (almost) impossible -
and Wine developers' stance seems to be "We'll stay with X11 because
Wayland is incomplete" [2].

Most Wayland compositors support XWayland, and therefore, are ok with
applications using absolute positioning - as long as the application is
using the X11 protocol. Would a Wayland protocol extension for this be a
"lesser evil"? It could allow specific applications like Wine to access the
"undesirable" features, while other applications would be restricted to the
main protocols.

Of course, nothing stops Gnome or any other compositor from implementing
its own protocol for this - but I was hoping to hear some feedback and
opinions, and possibly come up with a solution that everyone is happy with.

[1]
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/wayland-on-wine-an-exciting-first-update.html
[2] https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2021-February/181338.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/attachments/20210219/4ace390e/attachment.htm>