Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 8:15 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak by Serge
Parent article: LCA: The X-men speak

Turning those features into plugins won't help much as well. It's just instead of large and complex wayland protocol you'll get a simple protocol together with large and complex weston Plugins API.

Which can be happily ignored by most applications. The bits which are needed by applications (things like notification pupups or tray icons) are not supported by X anyway and are implemented separately even today.

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 9:35 UTC (Thu) by Serge (guest, #84957) [Link] (4 responses)

> The bits which are needed by applications (things like notification pupups or tray icons) are not supported by X anyway and are implemented separately even today.

They ARE supported by X. That's the beauty of X. You don't have to patch X.Org to get system tray. You just need a tray host, and you can use regular X11 messages and EWMH to make it work, X11 is flexible enough for that.

Wayland is not that nice. To get system tray in wayland you first need to reinvent your own protocol, which will be used by all the applications to create tray icons. Then you need a patch (or a plugin) for wayland compositor and library. And you'll have to update that patch/plugin with every new compositor/library release. You cannot implement it separately.

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 13:58 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

Yeah, in Wayland your tray host and clients would exchange Wayland messages instead of custom X messages.

Big difference, I know.

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 16:51 UTC (Thu) by Serge (guest, #84957) [Link] (2 responses)

> Yeah, in Wayland your tray host and clients would exchange Wayland messages instead of custom X messages. Big difference, I know.

In X.Org you just start your tray or taskbar host and it works. If you don't like it, you close it, open another one, and it works. No need to patch X.Org, no need to restart other apps. You can even have multiple taskbars, if you wish.

Wayland compositor IS the host. And there're no wayland messages to exchange. To have your tray you must write a patch/plugin for the compositor, and add your new messages as wayland protocol extension, then you will get the tray. And if you don't like it, you have to kill this compositor, with all the apps running there, and build another compositor with another tray patch.

Imagine that you have to patch and rebuild X.Org every time you want to look at Gnome/KDE/XFCE/LXDE/IceWM/FluxBox/OpenBox/etc. That's what you're going to get with wayland. That's the difference.

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 16:58 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> If you don't like it, you close it, open another one, and it works. No need to patch X.Org, no need to restart other apps. You can even have multiple taskbars, if you wish.
Hm. I closed gnome-panel and opened xfce panel. I'm NOT seeing my applets from GNOME there. Skype's icon is also gone.

> Wayland compositor IS the host. And there're no wayland messages to exchange. To have your tray you must write a patch/plugin for the compositor, and add your new messages as wayland protocol extension, then you will get the tray.
Exactly as in X.

> And if you don't like it, you have to kill this compositor, with all the apps running there, and build another compositor with another tray patch.
Wrong. You simply can reload the plugin. Or write a compositor that simply forwards messages to your out-of-process tray host. In fact, both approaches are being tried right now.

There is no standard protocol for this right now, but it's just a question of finding a consensus and making a standard, not some fundamental deficiency.

Also, X's tray protocol is woefully incomplete. So KDE and GNOME now use DBUS instead of X for communication.

Wayland the "successor" LCA: The X-men speak

Posted Feb 14, 2013 17:03 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> Imagine that you have to patch and rebuild X.Org every time you want to look at Gnome/KDE/XFCE/LXDE/IceWM/FluxBox/OpenBox/etc. That's what you're going to get with wayland. That's the difference.

What?

I don't think this is how things work. Wayland is just the protocol, your compositor/WM has all the logic in it just the same as it is today. If your WM wants some window to be special such as a taskbar or whatever then that's its prerogative. There will be many different window managers surely, just as there is today, I'm not sure what this talk of patching and rebuilding has to do with anything...