Window/Menu Positioning Improvements For GTK+ On Wayland/Mir

[liam]

the intent of wayland is to not allow specific placement at any coordinates, BUT it is an extendable protocol. the idea here would be to have a SEMANTIC protocol like for example "i'm a notification window" or "i'm a taskbar window" or "i'm a global menu window" etc. etc. and THEN the compositor will make appropriate positioning and sizing decisions and let the client know. for relative positioned menus, comboboxes, tooltips etc. etc. this is similar but "i'm a menu FOR a control with geometry x, y, w x h in this parent window - place me intelligently and then let me know". that kind of hasn't been fleshed out/done yet and what the gtk guys are doing.

That's what xdg-shell is for, aiui.
That lets you treat the wl_surface like a window, complete with scaling and positioning.

[rastersoft]

That sounds like the window managers job. And in this case the compositor and window manager is one and the same.

Ok, let's see it this way: I want to port Plank, the docker, to wayland. Could it be done (because it should be put in the bottom-middle of the screen), or a docker must be implemented in the window manager?

[duby229]

Ok, let's see it this way: I want to port Plank, the docker, to wayland. Could it be done (because it should be put in the bottom-middle of the screen), or a docker must be implemented in the window manager?

I don't use Ubuntu, so I'm not sure about this, but doesn't that dock have a hard dependency on Unity? I'm absolutely sure a window manager would have to be started first anyway.

EDIT: Without a window manager running, there wouldn't be a GUI session running to put the dock on.

[raster]

That's what xdg-shell is for, aiui.
That lets you treat the wl_surface like a window, complete with scaling and positioning.

yeah. i know. it has x,y positioning. this is really currently a design artifact to make things work for existing sw/toolkits. the positioning thing this article points to is an addition to xdg shell (or will be) to avoid needing absolute positioning. in the end you want to drop abs positioning entirely from xdg shell once alternate mechanisms are in place.

[rastersoft]

I don't use Ubuntu, so I'm not sure about this, but doesn't that dock have a hard dependency on Unity? I'm absolutely sure a window manager would have to be started first anyway.

EDIT: Without a window manager running, there wouldn't be a GUI session running to put the dock on.

Plank is not part of Unity, it is just a GTK+ application (the dock in Unity is different). In fact, I'm using Plank in debian, but it is available in fedora, ubuntu, and more. But it needs to be always on top, and at the bottom-center part.

[liam]

yeah. i know. it has x,y positioning. this is really currently a design artifact to make things work for existing sw/toolkits. the positioning thing this article points to is an addition to xdg shell (or will be) to avoid needing absolute positioning. in the end you want to drop abs positioning entirely from xdg shell once alternate mechanisms are in place.

I understand why that would be desirable but I think the difficulty of making such a protocol might be prohibitive without SOME leaks.