Identifying the real display server

[Ted Gould]

On Sat, 2015-04-11 at 00:33 +0200, Mattias Andrée wrote:

> Is there another way to identify which display server is
> actually running? If not, I propose we add the environment
> variable REAL_DISPLAY. The value of REAL_DISPLAY should be
> then name of the environment variable used by the display
> server that is actually running. For example if Wayland is
> running with an X compatibility layer, the value of
> REAL_DISPLAY should be WAYLAND_DISPLAY.


I think this is backwards. The system is more likely to want to setup
the environment for the application rather than the application adapting
to the system based on a list.

As an example we're discussing supporting current applications that
required X on the Ubuntu Desktop when running Mir. If a user is running
applications that all can talk to Mir directly we're not going to start
any type of X compatibility, there's no reason to have it. If the
application needs that X compatibility we'll start that proxy as part of
the application startup and the application will start in a world that
it has X and it is happy.

So, it seems to me, that a better solution is to add a key to the
desktop file that is something like:

  PerferredDisplayProtocol=mir;x11;wayland;

Then we could also not show applications (or show them disabled or some
such) that require a protocol that we can't support on a particular
system.

Ted

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