External panel plugins on Wayland

[Alex]

Hi Gaël,

thanks for the headsup !

> Concerning the code  structure it's quite natural, since it keeps the socket/plug
structure, and it reuses all the process management and IPC mechanism
already in place. I just added some D-Bus signals/methods, and an
abstraction layer to distinguish X11 and Wayland implementations of
socket/plug.

Sounds good to me ... probablya nice way to keep X11 backward
compartibility while keeping well structured code .

Looking forward to run a wayland xfce session when your MR and the one
from xfdesktop gets merged :D !

Cheers, Alex

Am 28.10.22 um 13:13 schrieb Gaël Bonithon:
> Hi all,
>
> It seems that I have found a viable, albeit non-native, solution for
> external panel plugins on Wayland (i.e. plugins running in a separate
> process).
>
> Since I really didn't want to go down the embedding compositor route,
> I followed a bit of the same idea as the XDG foreign protocol, but for
> layer shell windows, and using D-Bus instead of the compositor to
> synchronize the "socket" and "plug" geometries, to follow the GTK
> terminology.
>
> It works quite well, better than I would have thought in fact,
> especially when moving the panel: since the overlay of the plug and
> socket is not managed internally by the compositor, we can see that
> the plugins dissociate a little from the panel when moving, but it
> remains reasonable. It is not excluded that other side effects appear
> here or there though, knowing that it also depends on the way the
> compositor implements the layer-shell protocol.
>
> On the other hand, some graphical limitations related to the XEmbed
> protocol do not apply anymore, as for background images in this issue
> [1]. By making the plug background transparent, we obtain a
> homogeneous rendering on the whole panel as with internal plugins.
>
> Concerning the code structure it's quite natural, since it keeps the
> socket/plug structure, and it reuses all the process management and
> IPC mechanism already in place. I just added some D-Bus
> signals/methods, and an abstraction layer to distinguish X11 and
> Wayland implementations of socket/plug.
>
> This way, if by chance an extension of the XDG foreign protocol to
> layer shell windows should come along, or anything else that keeps
> this socket/plug structure, maintenance should be quite simple. I have
> little hope that this will happen though, reading this rather
> informative issue [2] ("Allow embedding foreign wl_surfaces", already
> quoted in previous threads, and not only closed, but locked...).
>
> With this I'm getting closer to something that can be merged anyway
> [3], it should be good soon after the release of Xfce 4.18 I think :)
>
> Cheers,
> Gaël
>
> --
> [1] https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/-/issues/107
> [2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/74
> [3] https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/-/merge_requests/103
>
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