Re: LibUnique as blessed dependency

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

> The multiple backends, IMO, are just historical cruft from libgunique.
>  They reflect an inability of ours at the time to determine what the
> right thing to use was. (Note that D-Bus was not stable at the time)
> Vytautas, Matthias, and I figured that we'd eventually decide on just
> one but figured it was easiest to just forge ahead trying to get a
> proof of concept for whatever might ultimately be used.

this is still the reason why I left the multiple backends in. Unix
domain sockets and Xlibs still guarantee the ability to implement this
kind of functionality in the most portable way - via SSH forwarding, or
on multiple users setups - and yet D-Bus makes the code very easy to
write and expandable, and should be enough for probably the 80% of the
cases we care about. libunique tries to be smart, and in the end I'd
like to drop the multiple backends.

Havoc and Elijah are right: this kind of functionality should be added
to the toolkit; as of now, GTK+ doesn't have any application class, so
it doesn't make sense to add a "single instance" application class
without its obvious ancestor - and changing the hierarchy afterwards
just for the sake of having single instance support in GTK+ now it's not
an option if we want to preserve ABI and API.

so, for the time being, and considering the small number of applications
requiring to be single instances, and that maybe link bonobo and C. just
for this, a small library is the most viable option.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net