Hi, here is an idea for something that could be an advanced entry-level project for getting to know the guts of the Wayland wire protocol, and a self-contained newbie(?) project.
We have the environment variable WAYLAND_DEBUG, which you can use to print out the protocol dump. It is useful, but it has come catches: - The printing happens when the protocol wrapper function is called (sending), or a message is dispatched (receiving). This is not when the message is actually transmitted through the socket. - The timestamp is also recorded during the printing, not when the message passes through the socket. - If a protocol object does not have a listener set, dispatching of incoming messages is skipped, and nothing is printed even if there was a message. - If a client uses multiple queues (wl_display has its own queue, so that happens always now), the message ordering is not preserved in the dump. The dump shows the order of dispatching, not the order on the wire. The first two items are actually useful features sometimes, and unwanted at other times. The last item causes confusion, because you can see wl_display.delete_id for an object, then followed by an event through that just-died object. Also, when using WAYLAND_DEBUG=server, it is near-impossible to tell the difference between clients. To complement WAYLAND_DEBUG, it would be nice to have a proxy program that would do the dumping. A tool, that would be used like $ wayland-trace [options] client_program [program arguments] This tool would connect to the Wayland server, and pass another socket fd via WAYLAND_SOCKET to the client it forks. Then, the tool would act as a proxy, collecting all the traffic. Some open problems I cannot answer off-hand are: - Some messages carry file descriptors. Is it possible to write a proxy without having the protocol definition (XML files) needed to decode the messages? If not, the dumper won't work for unknown protocol extensions. - Should wayland-trace itself use libwayland-client and libwayland-server? Maybe not? Some features that I think might be cool: - Dumps optionally(?) in machine-readable format. (So people can write a GUI for inspecting dumps.) - The ability to load .xml protocol specification files directly, without having to compile them into the program with e.g. wayland-scanner. The major point of this tool would be to dump exactly what and when goes over the wire. What do you think, would it be useful? Thanks, pq _______________________________________________ wayland-devel mailing list wayland-devel@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel
