Whoops, I somehow thought it said “Sunday”, not “Saturday”. Are we doing 1-3 or 1-4? Here’s 1-3, which were rather basic I think, and I got 4 ready where we finally write some code.


1 Introduction

Quote:designed and built by the alumni of the venerable Xorg server

Very important point right at the start: It’s made by the same people that were involved with X11. So we can hope that they learned from past mistakes and did better this time. Put differently, it’s not a bunch of “know-it-alls” who saw X11 and arrogantly proclaimed: “Nah, I can do that better!”

Quote:Outside of the box, we have your displays, keyboard, mouse, perhaps some speakers and a cute USB cup warmer.

Oops, guilty. https://movq.de/v/66aa180637/cupwarmer.jpg (Works. Kind of.)

Chapter 1.1 finishes with a rough overview of the several libraries involved. Mostly nothing new to learn here.


2 Protocol Design

First interesting point: Unix domain sockets are so important for Wayland, because we can transfer file descriptors between processes. That’ll be used to transfer clipboard contents, yes? Good! So we can finally get rid of the horrible X11 clipboard mechanism.

In 2.2, we already see a bit of the protocol on the wire. Looks good, simple.

Okay, requests, events, nothing spectacular.

2.3 tells us how the XML files are to be read. Nothing fancy. I couldn’t help but notice that the XML files are rather simple – unlike some other beasts.

2.4: Atomicity. Much different from X11, where it didn’t exist. Someone (probably mort?) once said in IRC, that X11 looks terribly ugly with all the partial screen updates, but you just don’t notice them, unless you have used Wayland for a while. I hope that isn’t true, because I didn’t plan on switching to Wayland right away. We’ll see.


3 libwayland in depth

Hmm, alright, we get an overview of the code that is generated from the XML specs. It doesn’t look too complicated and it’s really only just a bunch of objects, requests, and events. I’m starting to see the pieces come together, but we’re not quite there yet. It’s probably just the foundation for the next chapters.