GSoC idea

[Sebastian Sauer]

On 02/23/2012 05:59 PM, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> On Thursday 23 February 2012 Feb, Smit Patel wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Sebastian Sauer<mail at dipe.org>  wrote:
>>
>>> **
>>> On 02/23/2012 01:31 PM, Smit Patel wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> I'd like to propose a GSoC project. Here's the brief description about
>>> project idea.
>>> Provide a dbus API that provides an generic interface that can be used by
>>> external bibliography engines (xbiblio, kbibtex, bibus)
>>>
>>>
>>> dbus is optional[1] and so would be everything that depends on it. So, why
>>> dbus? Why not just a plugin? If it should be in another process (stability,
>>> long-running things, shared among Words-processes, etc) then why not for
>>> example QLocalServer?
>>>
>> If dbus is not available for windows and OSX then we can rule that out.
> Well, actually dbus _is_ available on both Windows and OSX.
1. re Windows; Not per default what means you need to ship your own 
version of it in the installer. If any app does that then it completely 
voids what dbus is for. dbus is and always will be be an alien on that 
platforms cause all other software is using the native IPC mechanism. 
You end with an IPC only used by you (not exactly what it is for) and 
even more worse, you exclude yourself from the outer world by shipping 
something own.

2. re OSX; my knowledge is a few years old but back then when I hacked 
on dbus making it running at >=Vista I did not found a single line of 
code that handles OSX. But I can imagine that it changed meanwhile. In 
any case I doubt it's well maintained and it definitively is not straith 
forward to work on that code-base.

> It's just a bit of a bother on Windows and rather a big bother on OSX.

And here I ask myself why we should bother at all? What gain does this 
bring to Calligra? I would say exactly zero, none, null, nil, nada.

But yes, technical it should be possible to just port dbus to e.g. 
Symbian, Android, OSX, QNX, etc. pp. It's just not related to Calligra.