dbus / mbus (was Re: glib in kdesupport: yes or no?)

[Tim Jansen]

On Tuesday 11 March 2003 03:11, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> political reasons. maybe we can leverage this into Apache and other
> projects by making it an inescapable de facto standard." that's reading
> between the lines, i know, but that's how it comes off.

Yes, but such a protocol is needed. Few few examples why:

- system-wide notifications. For many purposes a application should be 
notified of a system event. When the user attachs a printer to the system the 
desktop should help the user to configure it, or when a user attachs a 
joystick while a game is running the game should recognize and use it 
immediately without the need of a restart. The linux-hotplug(.sf.net) group 
talked about the need of a centralized server for thing like this, but so far 
nobody came up with a solution. A system-wide DCOP-equivalent could help a 
lot. It would even be possible to implement hotplugging notifications using 
the current hotplug scripts if there is a equivalent of the dcop command line 
program

- offering centralized services to applications. Right now we have at least 4 
HTTP servers in KDE CVS: kpf, kxmlrpcd, saape and the one for krfb (actually 
a shell script for kinetd). If a system is running several users in a 
thin-client setup there's a huge number of servers running that all need to 
allocate ports and make many things complicated. Many things would be easier 
if there was only one http server running that offers users and their 
application a part of its namespace. 
There are also several other network services that could also need such a 
architecture.


> i hate de facto standards. anyone attempting to accomplish a "standard" by
> convincing the world it's "de facto" is not playing by the rules of
> pragmatic appreciation of quality but by the rules of dictatorship.

BTW there is a protocol that has a properties that are very similar to DCOP 
and especially DBUS: MBus. Described in RFC 3259, the homepage is 
www.mbus.org. The site is quite focused on the use in (video/audio) 
conferencing applications because it has been invented to coordinate 
conferencing apps, but it is application-neutral. The base protocol is very 
simple, but has bindings for encryption and network uni-, broad- and 
multicasting of messages. It is not binary though.

bye...