Yet another Wayland thread [LWN.net]

Yet another Wayland thread

Posted Mar 17, 2013 9:45 UTC (Sun) by Serge (guest, #84957)
In reply to: Yet another Wayland thread by Cyberax
Parent article: Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)

> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/tree/doc/Wayland - enjoy... What exactly do you not understand?

"Wayland is a protocol for a new display server", "The wayland protocol is an asynchronous object oriented protocol", "The interfaces, requests and events are defined in protocol/wayland.xml". I don't see anything about "IPC" or applications that "can use this IPC to exchange any type of data".

> That Wayland is both the name of a protocol AND its default implementation (i.e. Wayland)? Or that Wayland protocol can be used to carry app- and shell-specific data?

The link you posted states that Wayland is a protocol and Weston is implementation. Have you read it yourself? ;-)

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Yet another Wayland thread

Posted Mar 17, 2013 10:04 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> "Wayland is a protocol for a new display server", "The wayland protocol is an asynchronous object oriented protocol", "The interfaces, requests and events are defined in protocol/wayland.xml".
This makes it an IPC, by definition.

> I don't see anything about "IPC" or applications that "can use this IPC to exchange any type of data".
Check the source code. There are no restrictions on message content.

Yet another Wayland thread

Posted Mar 17, 2013 11:11 UTC (Sun) by Serge (guest, #84957) [Link]

> This makes it an IPC, by definition.

Hm. But it allows you to communicate with compositor only, and using protocol/wayland.xml messages only. Among others you also have a weird definition for "IPC"...

> Check the source code. There are no restrictions on message content.

protocol/wayland.xml is the source code of the protocol.

> Weston is a reference implementation of the Wayland compositor. Which is a separate piece from Wayland protocol or library. What do you not understand?

Ah! So what you called "Wayland" was libwayland-client (or was it libwayland-server?) I wonder, when you said "X" were you talking about libX11?

Anyway, I understand you now. Yes, libwayland allows you to send messages that are not part of the Wayland protocol, and you don't have to rebuild libwayland to send custom messages.

But that does not change much. In X world if you want your app displayed in some special way in your dockbar you need to patch you app and your dockbar, but you don't have to patch WM or X-server. In Wayland world you need to patch your app, dockbar and compositor. And it will work on your compositor only.

Yet another Wayland thread

Posted Mar 17, 2013 10:05 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> The link you posted states that Wayland is a protocol and Weston is implementation. Have you read it yourself? ;-)
Weston is a reference implementation of the Wayland compositor. Which is a separate piece from Wayland protocol or library. What do you not understand?