Re: D-Bus

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Fri, 2003-02-28 at 09:27, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:

>   I took a quick look at these, and I don't change my opinion at all. In
> fact, I become more worried.
> 
>   And, BTW, my opinion is (not that it matters too much):
> 
> 	1. KDE/GNOME integration is indeed good;
> 
> 	2. D-BUS is bad. A better alternative would be:
> 
> 		a. Let KDE keep DCOP;
> 
> 		b. Let GNOME keep CORBA;
> 
> 		c. Make a cross-desktop daemon that supports a specific CORBA IDL
> interface (sendMessage, receiveMessage, etc.) and also supports DCOP,
> and routes messages between the 2 system.

OK, one of us misread something here - as I understand, D-BUS does *not*
replace DCOP or CORBA.  It is a message passing protocol.  Not a full
RPC mechanism.  Also, D-BUS is intended for usage outside of just
KDE/GNOME, so simply using a gateway between DCOP/CORBA won't solve all
the issues addressed.

It does seem silly to try to tack on a new ipc mechanism because the
current implementations aren't up to snuff; I couldn't find anything
about this in the dbus mail list archives - has the possibility of
"merging" orbit/dcop/dbus been examined?  orbit/dcop both serve a
similar purpose (using different protocols, of course), and d-bus is
intended to make up for a lack of functionality between the two
systems.  If GNOME3/KDE4 moved to a shared RPC mechanism that also had
the message-passing/lite-ipc feature, it might solve more problems than
simply tacking on a new system.  I mean, which features do both desktop
need from the three, and design a good protocol based on those needs.

And while moving GNOME/KDE to a new RPC would be painful, it *would*
solve some other integration problems, and moving to a single shared
service for all three tasks (GNOME RPG, KDE RPC, simple IPC) might just
reduce maintenance overhead in the future.  And, of course, we wouldn't
switch a stable platform (GNOME2.x, KDE3.x) to a new RPC mechanism. 
Heck, if the system is well designed enough, maybe we can get future
NFS/NIS implementations running on it instead of that icky Sun-RPC
stuff, too. ;-)

> 
> 	3. I don't like message-oriented communication much; I see this as a
> sacrifice that has to be made for the sake of integration. However, I
> only wish this is used only for a selected (and small) group of features
> that need to be cross-desktop.

Message passing as per D-BUS is less of an app-to-app feature, and more
of a broadcast feature.  It's not so much attempting to add another RPC
mechanism as just to try to solve a problem we haven't solved otherwise,
yet.

> 
>   Regards.