Re-purposing KWaylandServer

[Aleix Pol]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 9:44 AM Vlad Zahorodnii <vlad.zahorodnii at kde.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Currently, KWaylandServer library is a collection of convenience Qt
> wrappers around Wayland protocols. The issue with such a design is that
> the bulk of work needs to be still done in the compositor, for example
> it still needs to deal with importing client buffers, setting up the
> session, handling of input and drm devices, launching xwayland, etc.
>
> I believe that a better design will involve offloading all non-kwin
> features from kwin to kwaylandserver:
>
> * kwin code base will be leaner. All window management features will be
> in kwin, while low level specific bits will be well contained in
> kwaylandserver
>
> * it's a more reusable design in general; this allows writing domain
> specific wayland compositors easier, for example for tv, mobile, etc
>
> * the implementation of some wayland protocols will become a bit more
> straightforward. At the moment, due to odd split of functionality
> between kwin and kwaylandserver, it's not clear what the best way to
> implement some protocols or features is, e.g. presentation feedback,
> linux dma-buf, popup grabs, etc
>
> * it's a safer design choice in long term. Currently, things go quite
> well in kwin, but just in case something goes wrong and we decide to
> start a new Wayland compositor, we won't have to write low level
> components such as the DRM backend, input device handling, and so on
> from scratch.

I don't feel like there's a use-case for it.

I also don't have the feeling that having 2 separate repositories help
with anything. Moving code from one side to another is cumbersome and
makes history tracking more complex.

I think it would be even cool if we didn't have kwayland-server
altogether. From my perspective, its only reason to be is
kscreenlocker which needs some classes from it:
KWayland::Server::Display and KWayland::Server::ClientConnection.

That's it.
And as it is, I just realised that it was never ported to kwayland-server...

Aleix