1# Wayland 2 3Wayland is a project to define a protocol for a compositor to talk to 4its clients as well as a library implementation of the protocol. The 5compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel 6modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland 7client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers 8(rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers. 9 10The wayland protocol is essentially only about input handling and 11buffer management. The compositor receives input events and forwards 12them to the relevant client. The clients creates buffers and renders 13into them and notifies the compositor when it needs to redraw. The 14protocol also handles drag and drop, selections, window management and 15other interactions that must go through the compositor. However, the 16protocol does not handle rendering, which is one of the features that 17makes wayland so simple. All clients are expected to handle rendering 18themselves, typically through cairo or OpenGL. 19 20Building the wayland libraries is fairly simple, aside from libffi, 21they don't have many dependencies: 22 23 $ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland 24 $ cd wayland 25 $ meson build/ --prefix=PREFIX 26 $ ninja -C build/ install 27 28where PREFIX is where you want to install the libraries. 29 30See https://wayland.freedesktop.org for documentation. 31