Can a confined Wayland server snap work on Classic systems? (And also Core systems?)

[alan_g]

@jamesh

As far as $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR goes, you really need a user session for that to make sense. Creating the directory yourself outside of a session is also a bit risky: systemd could come along and mount a tmpfs over the top.

I don’t think snap should be setting the environment variable if it is started in a context where it hasn’t already been set.

I theory I agree and a Wayland server could use “magic” to pass an FD directly to a client without using $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.

But, in practice, FD passing is not supported by the toolkits I’ve looked at, and there’s no “magic” in the wayland interface that makes it possible to pass the FD. That left making the endpoint in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR “work” as the agreed mechanism. (The Wayland, dconf and XDG_RUNTIME_DIR link mentioned above explains where we were before this stopped working on Classic.)