Weston's Full-Screen Shell Protocol Revised Again

The full-screen shell protocol for Wayland's Weston compositor will allow for features like splash screens and terminal emulators as simple full-screen clients, but the code is still being revised ahead of its hopeful merger.

Jaskon Ekstrand and other developers, including former Canonical employee Bryce Harrington, have been working on this new Weston fullscreen shell protocol. The fullscreen shell protocol is designed to make it easy to support simple full-screen clients like splash screens and terminal emulators in an easy and convenient manner rather than having the simple clients talk to DRM/KMS directly, input/output abstraction, easing up development of compositors, and allowing support for screen sharing and recording. As part of the fullscreen shell protocol for Weston is also a screen sharing plug-in.

On Monday the fifth version of these eighteen patches were published. Version 5 of these patches mark the protocol as experimental, a capabilities mechanism has been added, support for weston-fullscreen to draw its own cursor, and there's various fixes over the earlier versions of this code that have been published in past months.

Those Wayland enthusiasts and developers wishing to checkout this latest experimental protocol can find the work currently floating via the Wayland-devel mailing list and through this GitHub branch.