xfdesktop & wayland

Alex acs82 at gmx.de
Mon Sep 19 22:36:10 CEST 2022


Hi Gaël,

sounds reasonable to me to have the functionallity in a library if it
will be used in multiple components.

Adding the functionallity as an optional dependency to libxfce4util
maybe is no good idea. I dont know if we could check in the panel
'configure.ac' if the existing xfce4util was build with or without
"xfwl" support. I have the feeling that this could get messy.

So I suppose a separate, "libxfwl" would be a better solution. At least
until the wayland MR[1] got merged and released.

Regarding the procedure, I have no clue ;) ... my naive idea would be:
If you have something ready & polished in your user-space, it just could
be moved to the "Xfce" group.

Cheers, Alex(xcons)

P.S: @Brian: Congratulations to your xfdesktop wayland port ! Great to
hear that somebody is hacking on xfdesktop again. Currently I dont have
time to play with the branch, though sooner or later I will give it a spin !


[1]
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/40

Am 19.09.22 um 20:29 schrieb Gaël Bonithon:
> What do you think about creating a repository for the new Libxfwl
> library I mentioned in the previous thread [1] though? And if it has
> to be done, what would be the procedure to follow?
>
> Cheers,
> Gaël
>
> --
> [1] https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/2022-September/033008.html
>
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Monday, September 19th, 2022 at 5:28 PM, <andre at andreldm.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Gaël and Brian,
>> It's exciting to see people already working on Wayland support, I'm
>> still not there yet, maybe some day I'll join the party. For now I
>> can't comment on implementation details.
>>
>> Regarding 4.18, I think we discussed it sometime ago that it would be
>> another regular iteration of Xfce on X11, by the time of 4.20 cycle
>> (in 2~4 years) we would have decided how bad is to continue using X11
>> and if a full migration would make sense. Of course nothing is set in
>> stone.
>>
>> Some core components such as Thunar and Appfinder are low hanging
>> fruits, Wayland support can coexisting in their code base. Others
>> like Panel and Xfdesktop require a good deal of changes, I think you
>> can decide which approach works best for you, either merge requests
>> or forks in a "Wayland group". Please just keep the work somewhere
>> visible in our gitlab instance and the wiki page[1] as updated as
>> possible.
>>
>> 1 - https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Andre Miranda
>>
>> Sep 19, 2022, 18:28 by trash.paradise at protonmail.com:
>>
>>     Hi Brian,
>>
>>         My branch[2] is super rough and needs some significant
>>         refactoring, but feel free to check it out if you want.
>>
>>
>>     It would be nice if you opened a merge request I think when you
>>     have something watchable.
>>
>>         get the default GdkDisplay, and then test if it's a
>>         GdkX11Display or a GdkWaylandDisplay. Is there a better way
>>         to do that?
>>
>>
>>     No, that's the way I think it should be done. See for example the
>>     introductory section of this doc [1].
>>
>>         I guess Wayland has a workspaces concept via a protocol extension
>>
>>
>>     Not at the moment to my knowledge, except this KDE protocol [2],
>>     but I don't think we want to use that. Otherwise there is this
>>     proposal [3], but it is not accepted at the moment.
>>
>>         maybe a new meta-library that has an API exposing the
>>         functionality possible on both X11 and Wayland makes sense.
>>
>>
>>     I've been wondering about integrating this with Libxfwl
>>     (mentioned in [4]) when porting the ShowDesktop plugin to Wayland
>>     in the last few days (see the last two current commits of [5]).
>>
>>     For the moment I preferred to leave it out of the library, so its
>>     purpose would remain purely Wayland. The wrappers pointing to
>>     Libwnck or Libxfwl are therefore in ShowDesktop. I'm not yet
>>     convinced that it's worth writing a library for a few lines of
>>     wrapping... (or to integrate it into an existing library)
>>
>>     Glad to see that another component is being ported to Wayland
>>     anyway! One more argument to make Libxfwl exist as a real library.
>>
>>     It would be nice to have some additional opinions about this from
>>     some core devs. Andre, Alex, Simon what do you think? :)
>>
>>     Cheers,
>>     Gaël
>>
>>     --
>>     [1]
>>     https://developer-old.gnome.org/gdk3/stable/GdkDisplayManager.html
>>     [2] https://wayland.app/protocols/kde-plasma-virtual-desktop
>>     [3]
>>     https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/40
>>     [4]
>>     https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/2022-September/033008.html
>>     [5] https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/-/merge_requests/96
>>
>>     ------- Original Message -------
>>     On Monday, September 19th, 2022 at 9:32 AM, Brian Tarricone
>>     <brian at tarricone.org> wrote:
>>
>>         Hey all,
>>
>>         A post on HN got me interested in Wayland again, and I
>>         decided to see where my favorite DE was wrt Wayland. I was
>>         excited to find out that there's been some work in that area,
>>         especially the recent thread about xfce4-panel. Saw the wiki
>>         page and that xfdesktop crashes on startup with Wayland, so I
>>         thought I'd take a look (xfdesktop will always have a special
>>         place in my heart, and it's been... oh my, 13 years since I
>>         last worked on it!).
>>
>>         Anyhow, I did some preliminary work, and got xfdesktop to the
>>         point where it comes up properly and draws the desktop
>>         background. I ended up using the gtk-layer-shell library[0]
>>         (a work of frightening yet useful hackery to be able to use
>>         the wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1 protocol[1] with GTK) to push
>>         xfdesktop's window to the bottom of the stack.
>>
>>         My branch[2] is super rough and needs some significant
>>         refactoring, but feel free to check it out if you want.
>>
>>         One open issue is runtime detection of X11 vs. Wayland. I
>>         didn't see anything in GTK that lets you query the active
>>         windowing backend (to be fair, though, I didn't look all that
>>         hard), so what I came up with was to get the default
>>         GdkDisplay, and then test if it's a GdkX11Display or a
>>         GdkWaylandDisplay. Is there a better way to do that? Another
>>         option would be to just use a command-line option, but I
>>         prefer to make things "just work" when possible.
>>
>>         The other major issue is libwnck being X11-only. I guess
>>         Wayland has a workspaces concept via a protocol extension,
>>         but there isn't a cross-windowing-environment library that
>>         lets you query them. Same issue for xfdesktop's window list
>>         menu (which also uses libwnck), where I could reuse the
>>         wlr-foreign-toplevel stuff from xfce4-panel. I kinda feel
>>         like porting libwnck to Wayland may not be the best idea due
>>         to feature mismatches, but maybe a new meta-library that has
>>         an API exposing the functionality possible on both X11 and
>>         Wayland makes sense. The X11 support could just use libwnck,
>>         while Wayland support could be written to use whatever
>>         protocols are available. I might take a swing at this if
>>         y'all think it makes sense.
>>
>>         Anyhow, it was fun to crack open the xfdesktop source code
>>         again after so long!
>>
>>         -brian
>>
>>         [0] https://github.com/wmww/gtk-layer-shell
>>         [1] https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1
>>         [2] https://gitlab.xfce.org/kelnos/xfdesktop/-/tree/wayland
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>>
>
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