Re: GDBus support on Win32 + other platforms (Was Re: GtkApplication and argc/arv)

[David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com>]

Hey,

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 10:26 AM, Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 10:00 AM, David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Just for the record, there's no reason that GDBus cannot be made to
>> work very nicely on Win32 or any other platform we care about. GDBus
>> (and D-Bus itself) was designed with this goal in mind.
>
> what functionality is (G)D-Bus supposed to be providing on other
> platforms? my impression has been that on linux it provides stuff that
> both OS X and Windows already provides (plus or minus a detail or
> two). if that impression is correct, why would anyone run (G)D-Bus on
> those platforms? if its not correct, what is the functionality that
> (G)D-Bus is offering to linux that is missing from those platforms? if
> you're talking about just a portable API to interact with various
> system services and notifications, then fine, but that's a bit
> different than talking about D-Bus itself, i think.

Yes, on the free desktop we use D-Bus a lot in system services
(udisks, upower etc.) and in the sessions to implement the desktop
itself (notifications, session management etc.) - neither of which
(portable) apps should use. Instead apps should use the interfaces in
GLib/GTK+.

For example, instead of speaking to udisks directly, the app should
use GVolumeMonitor which on Linux uses udisks and on Win32 uses the
native APIs. Ditto for pretty much everything else.

> just to be clear: i'm a big fan of the functionality that D-Bus  (at
> least the system bus and maybe the session bus too) has made possible
> on linux. i just don't understand why anyone would imagine using it on
> other platforms.

One place where D-Bus is useful is for an app to provide a remote
control interface so e.g. 3rd party apps can control it / interact
with it. The app just says: use interface org.App.Bar on object
/org/App/bar on the name org.App.FooApp on the session bus.

But, yeah, D-Bus isn't all that useful for apps as is it to build an
OS... I'd argue it would still be nice to have GDBus working *out of
the box* in Win32 and OS X. Someone just need to do the work - it's
already 99% done...

    David