Re: D-Bus

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Alex,

On Wed, 2003-03-05 at 10:35, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> At the moment, with what we have now, I think the reasonable thing to
> do is to put as much as you can in a single process, and when you need
> out-of-process components you need to make the ownership model as
> simple as possible.

	Yes - quite, couldn't agree more.

> [Warning, personal opinion, Potentialy flame inducing:]
> I also want to point out, although I know we disagree on this, that I 
> think the whole "fragile single process" idea is completely wrong. A 
> multiple process app is just as fragile. To a user the idea of "only half 
> the process crashing" is basically the same as the whole app crashing.

	:-) Indeed - I think I'd advocate using remote plugins, and separating
less frequently used pieces of functionality into different processes -
rather than particularly trying to designing stability into each and
every app this way. Here's how my thinking goes:

	+ there is a ~constant 6 bugs / 1000 lines of code
	+ this can be slightly reduced by heavy testing, code-review,
	  careful maintenance etc.
	+ new / exotic / unrelated features will per-se be less 
	  tested / robust.

	Thus - it makes perfect sense to have a GStreamer control out of
process, using a gnome-vfs streaming input as a preview in your
evolution mail view :-) or eg. a gnome-chess plugin to play interactive
games. OTOH - it doesn't make much sense to have the calendar separate
from the mailer [ unless you try to recover reliably ].

	So - my feeling is, that where things are pluggable in such a way as to
be able to create lots of code re-use in new/odd places, it's possible
that OOP plugins' stability enhancing effect makes some sense.
Particularly when eg. a nautilus copy or an evolution mail/sync may be
in-progress in the background.

	FWIW,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot