RFC: in-process embedding for the settings manager

[Brian Tarricone]

On Fri, Apr 14, 2023, at 01:43, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
> On 18.03.23 08:02, Brian Tarricone wrote:
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
> Fix wayland ?

There's nothing to fix; disallowing clients from obscuring or drawing on top of the windows of other clients is an intentional security feature of Wayland, which -- like many security features in general -- makes other things difficult.  Sure, we could design a new Wayland protocol for embedding that only we use (and only support it in xfwm4-as-wayland-compositor), but that seems like a poor choice.  (At any rate, the idea for this protocol has already been proposed, discussed, and rejected upstream.  I don't care to maintain something like this myself.)

As Olivier pointed out, there is already a "blessed" way to do this: an embedded/nested Wayland compositor.  I've already started working on one[0], mainly for the panel's use, but it could also be used here.  Unfortunately, this work is a bit more involved than implementing something like the X11-only XEMBED protocol.  I have something about 80% working, but am struggling to fix a few remaining issues.

Wayland, as I am learning, is full of trade offs.  Some of them I don't entirely agree with, but that's life.

     -b

[0] https://gitlab.xfce.org/kelnos/libwlembed