Core Wayland window system code and protocol
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Jie Liu a4f861a49a connection: allow NULL implementation and listener in wl_closure_invoke
In practice, not all callbacks defined by a wl_interface are needed by
every client or server. For instance, a client may only care about a
subset of events on an object and leave the rest unhandled.

Previously, a NULL implementation or a NULL listener function for a
specific opcode would cause a fatal wl_abort(), forcing users to
provide stub callbacks for every opcode even when they had nothing
to do. This made code unnecessarily verbose.

Downgrade the abort to a wl_log() warning and return early after
cleaning up file descriptors. This allows partial interface
implementations, simplifying user code while still logging a
diagnostic message for debugging.

Signed-off-by: Jie Liu <liujie01@kylinos.cn>
2026-04-02 10:31:22 +08:00
.gitlab/issue_templates gitlab: make issue template the default 2023-11-21 15:44:31 +00:00
cursor cursor: fix discards 'const' qualifier 2026-03-03 21:36:37 +00:00
doc doc: add frozen=true interface attribute 2026-03-05 12:00:35 +00:00
egl egl: Make wayland-egl symbols check depend on wayland_egl 2025-06-08 17:30:55 +00:00
protocol Add wl_fixes.ack_global_remove() 2026-03-24 13:45:00 +02:00
src connection: allow NULL implementation and listener in wl_closure_invoke 2026-04-02 10:31:22 +08:00
tests Add wl_fixes.ack_global_remove() 2026-03-24 13:45:00 +02:00
.editorconfig editorconfig: follow wayland-protocols XML style 2026-01-22 11:08:28 +02:00
.git-blame-ignore-revs fix .git-blame-ignore-revs revision 2026-02-02 14:00:28 +01:00
.gitignore build: drop autotools 2021-03-05 09:15:04 +00:00
.gitlab-ci.yml ci: upgrade FreeBSD to v14.4 2026-03-10 12:31:35 +01:00
.mailmap Add a .mailmap file 2023-03-25 11:17:32 -05:00
.triage-policies.yml Add a triage-policies file for bugbot 2023-07-07 21:18:08 +10:00
CONTRIBUTING.md CONTRIBUTING: fix typo "excercising" 2020-12-17 16:03:14 -05:00
COPYING COPYING: Update to MIT Expat License rather than MIT X License 2015-06-12 15:31:21 -07:00
git-blame-ignore-revs add .git-blame-ignore-revs file 2026-02-02 14:54:52 +02:00
meson.build build: re-open main branch for regular development 2026-03-20 11:17:40 +01:00
meson_options.txt doc: make DocBook validation optional 2026-02-04 15:12:04 +00:00
README.md readme: convert to Markdown 2023-02-13 19:57:15 +01:00
release.sh release.sh: Don't push *all* tags 2023-01-16 10:03:54 +00:00
releasing.txt Add release.sh 2022-07-14 08:04:43 +00:00
wayland-scanner.m4 build: check wayland-scanner version 2020-01-16 17:25:06 +01:00
wayland-scanner.mk Pass input/output files as arguments to wayland-scanner 2017-08-18 15:20:24 +03:00

Wayland

Wayland is a project to define a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a library implementation of the protocol. The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers.

The wayland protocol is essentially only about input handling and buffer management. The compositor receives input events and forwards them to the relevant client. The clients creates buffers and renders into them and notifies the compositor when it needs to redraw. The protocol also handles drag and drop, selections, window management and other interactions that must go through the compositor. However, the protocol does not handle rendering, which is one of the features that makes wayland so simple. All clients are expected to handle rendering themselves, typically through cairo or OpenGL.

Building the wayland libraries is fairly simple, aside from libffi, they don't have many dependencies:

$ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland
$ cd wayland
$ meson build/ --prefix=PREFIX
$ ninja -C build/ install

where PREFIX is where you want to install the libraries.

See https://wayland.freedesktop.org for documentation.