#river on 2021-03-16 — irc logs at freenode.irclog.whitequark.org

12:10 <novakane[m]> I'm looking more into how wayland and river works, so If I understand correctly, you have the display server, then the compositor, so river starts here. And after that you have surfaces and it gets a little confusing

12:11 <novakane[m]> Does a surface represent a part of the output and then multiple windows are drawn in it or does each windows have their own surface?

12:12 <ifreund> river is the display server, compositor, and window manager

12:12 <ifreund> and wayland server

12:13 <ifreund> wayland clients create surfaces and attach buffers to them, then the server (river) composits these buffers and displays them

12:13 <ifreund> see: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

12:22 <novakane[m]> Oh ok, so for exemple if I open a terminal window, river create a surface with like x, y, height, width, a buffer is created, then all decorations for the terminal windows are applied?

12:26 <novakane[m]> a buffer is all the info about what should be displayed in a surface but whitout displaying anything?

12:29 <novakane[m]> like a buffer is kinda like a back-end part of a website and then you have the front-end to display it

12:31 <ifreund> a buffer is raw pixel data

12:32 <ifreund> the client (e.g. foot) is what creates the buffer

12:33 <ifreund> and it communicates with the server about the properties of the buffer and passes the buffer's fd to the server for rendering

12:33 <ifreund> the simple borders drawn by river are done server-side

12:35 <ifreund> novakane[m]: you might be interested in reading the code of a simple hello world wayland client: https://github.com/ifreund/hello-zig-wayland

12:35 <ifreund> more complete C version here: https://github.com/emersion/hello-wayland

12:41 <novakane[m]> ok make more sense, thanks you I'm gonna read all of this, I'm really interested in this, I would like to be more involved in wayland compositors so I need to learn this!

12:43 <novakane[m]> also what is exactly the toplevel, only the info about title, maximized, etc... or is it more thant that?

14:19 <leon-p> novakane[m]: toplevel is the name chosen for a "normal" application window, a window that is not a child of a parent window (like a pop-up) but stands on its own. the name comes from X, where all windows where children of the root window and application windows where toplevel-children

14:20 <leon-p> s/where/were

14:20 <leon-p> so if you have a wl_surface with the xdg_surface role which in turn has the xdg_toplevel role, that is just a regular old window.

14:21 <leon-p> but the xdg_surface can have other roles as well, like popup

14:21 <leon-p> used for stuff like menus, AFAIK

14:22 <leon-p> note that users normally call popups (like a file open dialog) are more often than not also regular toplevels, which just have a parent set

14:35 <novakane[m]> leon-p: I get it, thanks for the answer!

15:21 <maringuu> Hey, sorry for the noise I'm testing my irc setup and cant figure out how to set me as afk

15:24 <leon-p> maringuu: there is /away, but I never bothered to use it

15:26 <maringuu> leon-p: Thanks but somehow this does not work. Other irc commands work through..

15:29 <maringuu> Ah, I guess it isn't implemented in emersion's soju

15:32 <emersion> maringuu: soju will automatically enable AWAY when all clients are disconnected

15:33 <emersion> i don't remember how we handle AWAY coming directly from clients

15:34 <maringuu> emersion: Great, thanks. Now that you say it I recall reading it in the man page

16:55 <ifreund> open source is great, we now have completions for bash, zsh, and fish and I didn't have to learn how to write any of them :)

17:00 <leon-p> yeah, was about to remark on the sudden explosion of completion scripts :D

21:35 <leon-p> apparently there will be a new wlroots release in a couple of weeks. Might be a good time to do that river release we talked about happening before fosdem, but then never appeared because river-layouts wasn't ready.

21:39 <ifreund> yeah definitely

21:39 <ifreund> I've got the river-options changes we talked about in a very WIP state locally

21:41 <ifreund> hmm, I think I'm going to block river's release on zig 0.8.0 as well though cause of the glibc linking issue

22:02 <leon-p> makes sense