Hi, I'm thinking this might be a job for a bit of translation shim within Xwayland. Everything an X client needs either has a Wayland equivalent (through an X server and a little translating XWM shim) or, where forbidden by Wayland, can be stubbed out with a few white lies e.g. "There are no other clients," "Your relative position is global."
I'm thinking of taking a whack at this. Are there any dragons in the Xserver I should be aware of? Best, Joseph On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 12:37 PM, Pekka Paalanen <ppaala...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, 6 Sep 2017 12:11:52 +0200 > Olivier Fourdan <four...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> On 6 September 2017 at 11:48, Joseph Burt <caseo...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> > To be clear, my first look at how the X11 channel is used in practice >> > hasn't yet turned up the justification for its existence. The logic >> > usually seems to be "if X client, send event over X11, else Wayland," >> > which is redundant. There must be something big, since tacking on a >> > X11 channel is a big protocol extension, but I haven't found any >> > discussion of that design decision. Can anyone point me in the right >> > direction? >> > >> >> >> Positioning, stacking, focus management, decorations, X11 window >> properties, ICCCM, etc. all those things that belong specifically to a X11 >> window manager which a Wayland compositor isn't. An X11 client running with >> Xwayland does not become a Wayland client, it's still an X11 client, >> whereas Xwayland itself is a Wayland client. >> >> I guess one could come up with a X11 window manager specific protocol for >> Wayland so that any compatible X11 window manager could integrate and work >> along with a Wayland compositor, but that would be quite a lot of work, and >> I am not sure about the benefits of such an approach. > > Hi, > > I understood the question the opposite way: why there is a X11 WM > integrated in each Wayland compositor instead of integrated into > Xwayland and shared by everyone? > > I can think a few possible reasons: > > - the big DEs already had a working X11 WM and the migration to Wayland > evolved from that rather than throwing it out first > > - there are no suitable Wayland extensions for much of what one can do > via X11, yet > > - the translation between X11 and Wayland window management protocols > and concepts is very painful if even possible in general, because of > the fundamental design difference: X11 is low-level (pure mechanism > with no context) while Wayland is high-level (intent and context to > let the server do the right thing) > > So it was easier to get Xwayland going by putting the X11 WM in the > Wayland compositor, than trying to create a common X11-Wayland WM > translation that would work for everything. > > Things might change in the future once Wayland on the desktop matures, > perhaps. > > > Thanks, > pq _______________________________________________ wayland-devel mailing list wayland-devel@lists.freedesktop.org https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel