Request and event naming conflict in the cosmic workspace protocol

[morr0ne]

I recently encountered an issue with the current implementation of the cosmic workspace protocol where a request and an event share the same name: remove. This came up while generating the protocol for my Wayland library, waynest. My library currently doesn't handle such edge cases because it implements protocols as traits, which causes an error when names are duplicated. While I recognize this is something I need to address on my end, I believe it also raises broader questions about the protocol itself.

From my understanding, this does not constitute a direct protocol violation, or at least none that I could find in the specifications. However, it seems to be a generally followed (perhaps unwritten) convention that requests and events should have unique names. Out of the 106 protocols I generate (full list here), the Cosmic Workspace Protocol is the only one exhibiting this naming overlap.

Beyond my specific use case, this could present broader challenges, such as:

• Debuggability: It’s harder to quickly identify which remove is being referenced during debugging.
• Readability: It can create confusion when reading documentation, as identical names may imply identical behavior.
• Code Maintainability: It adds complexity when handling differences between the request and event, making the code more awkward to work with.

I propose renaming the server-emitted event since its description suggests that it represents a workspace being destroyed, which might be better conveyed with a name distinct from remove.

Of course, this is just my perspective, and I’m primarily opening this issue to foster discussion. I recognize there might be other protocols that behave similarly that I haven’t encountered, but as Cosmic is relatively new, aligning with the established practices of other protocols could be beneficial.

[Drakulix]

Yeah, I tend to agree with these point, this probably happened on accident.

I am not 100% sure how to best solve this situation though. We have quite a few components dealing with cosmic-protocols, updating them in lock-step is quite the hassle.

I would rather deprecate either the event or the request, but given how abi stability works for wayland protocols, that doesn't resolve the naming conflict.

An alternative would be to role out a v2 of said protocol in parallel until every component has moved over, we have done in the past so for our screencopy protocol for example, but I am not sure I would go through that hassle for a simple naming change.

So if nobody has a better suggestion, I guess this simply comes on the pile of "stuff to fix, if we ever do a v2 before ext-workspace lands", which is probably not a very satisfying solution to your problem. :S

In any case I would encourage you to make a PR to https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland and amend the spec to forbid this. That way we can at least get a discussion going upstream to prevent this in the future.

[morr0ne]

It looks like the best way forward is to roll out a v2 of the protocol and gradually update the different parts of the ecosystem. It’s a bit of a hassle, but probably the most effective solution. I’ve opened #38 to start tackling it.

I’ll also be opening a PR against the Wayland protocol to help make sure this doesn’t happen again.

[morr0ne]

I opened a related pr on the freedesktop gitlab

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/merge_requests/432