(10-04-2021, 06:06 AM)venam Wrote: it's through these countless and different extensions that we find useful functionality. Though, I guess they aren't standard and so that makes them non-portable.

And that is my main takeaway from the book. At the core, Wayland is rather simple, and then the protocol extensions on top provide “actual” functionality.

Now, I’m either very stupid or my main concern about Wayland still stands: The compositor, a single program, has to implement all of that. I don’t see a way for, say, clipboard stuff to be implemented entirely in another program? This means when there’s an update to the clipboard protocol, then all compositors that implement it have to be updated as well. Right?

Given that the compositor is both display server and window manager (and people’s opinions on window managing varies a lot), we can expect there to be lots and lots of compositors, eventually. It’ll be absolutely imparative that, say, 2-4 libraries exist which can be used to build a compositor. Otherwise, this is going to be an enormous mess.

It would have been lovely if the protocol encouraged splitting all this into different programs, I think. Something that manages the basic display functions, a window manager, a clipboard implementation, and so on. Like a micro kernel, not a monolithic one. You know, this has always been one of my favorite aspects of the Linux world: You can re-combine things. Wayland appears to make this a bit harder – but it’s out of scope of the book, and I’m just speculating anyway.

Funny enough, reading the book has not yet convinced me to jump on the Wayland bandwagon. Yes, atomicity. Yes, no “override redirect” hack anymore. But other than that? Alright, X11 carries historical baggage, lots of it (stippled lines, looking at you) … and we can never get rid of that if we still want to call it “X11”. That’s probably the issue. Still, maybe a stripped down implementation of X11 that only offers what we really need today? So that we don’t have to reinvent the entire wheel? Hmm. Maybe it doesn’t work that way. Maybe we need a clean cut.

(09-04-2021, 07:02 AM)mcol Wrote: …

Thanks! That’s not as bad as I expected, actually. The book made it sound much worse. :)