Clipboard as a window system feature ?

Posted Aug 6, 2014 9:06 UTC (Wed) by moltonel (guest, #45207)
Parent article: Wayland in GNOME: two progress reports

I tought that clipboard support would be one of X's features that Wayland would drop, because it really doesn't have anything to do with the window system and you could implement it as a system service instead.

Am I missing something here, does copy-paste depend on the window system for some feature or performance ? Or does Wayland handle clipboards just out of habit, or because it took less time to implement ?

Clipboard as a window system feature ?

Posted Aug 6, 2014 9:25 UTC (Wed) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link] (1 responses)

Just spoted https://lwn.net/Articles/604421/ discussing this.

Clipboard as a window system feature ?

Posted Aug 6, 2014 20:04 UTC (Wed) by magcius (guest, #85280) [Link]

All Wayland is used for in the case of clipboard is to provide negotiation between the two clients.

The linked comment doesn't make any sense, and we won't support a model like that. Copying a giant image file should not dump it out to disk when the application already has it in memory, and certainly not in every format that can be transferred up-front. That would completely sacrifice performance, especially because applications re-take the clipboard when selecting text.