Ubuntu moving towards Wayland

[Brian Wheeler]

On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 14:19 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 14:01 -0500, Brian Wheeler wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 13:47 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> > > And I'm saying you can get the network remoting effect you like in X, in
> > > Wayland.  It's not built into the local Wayland rendering system, but
> > > there are both trivial ways to add it (vnc-like) and complicated ways to
> > > add it (rdp-like) and both will work.
> > 
> > So would it be a rooted VNC?  If so, that simply sucks.  The rdp style
> > is better, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is going to be hit or
> > miss in different toolkits the same way that GUI/TUI admin tools are
> > always "kept in sync".
> 
> Sorry, I assumed a bit much domain knowledge here.
> 

No worries

> When I say "vnc-like" I mean "let's scrape the pixels out of the
> rendering buffer and shove them over the wire".  VNC itself is rooted,
> but vnc-like remoting can be rooted or rootless.  In wayland the
> fundamental object of composition is a whole window, so you have
> scrapeable surfaces both at the window level and at the top level.  Take
> your pick.
> 

I was hoping that window-level scraping was possible but I wasn't sure
how to phrase it.


> When I say "rdp-like" I mean "instill enough awareness of the
> possibility of remoting in the rendering system that remoting can send a
> rendering command stream instead of raw pixels if that seems to be a
> win".  Wordy, I admit.  And, obviously, much more work than just
> vnc-like scraping.  But it's a serious win for WAN links, and is the
> only viable way to remote 3D, etc.
> 

Wordy, true, but I think its the kind of detail necessary to calm a lot
of the fears that people have.


> And, of course, you can have both at once.  rdp-like remoting probably
> requires toolkit awareness (in this bizarro world, the nested X server
> counts as a toolkit!), so if you end up remoting an app that lacks that
> level of toolkit support, you can fall back to vnc-like.
> 

Sounds reasonable enough

Brian