RFC: DBUS & KDE 4

[Maks Orlovich]

On Wednesday 29 September 2004 06:53 pm, Michael Pyne wrote:
> On Wednesday 29 September 2004 03:59 pm, Maks Orlovich wrote:
> > On Wednesday 29 September 2004 11:51 am, Harald Fernengel wrote:
> > > nope, there's no glib dependency. The API is a bit glib-ish, but we
> > > don't care since we do not expose it in our wrapper.
> >
> > We thought something like that about aRts, too.
>
> We think of Qt as a good wrapper around Xlib, so there's no reason that
> there can't be a good Qt wrapper around D-BUS (or almost any given C API
> for that matter).

Xlib is -old-. It's mature. It's stable. And it still has bugs. Thankfully, 
people like Lubos are willing to fix them when they affect us. Oh, and BTW,  
Qt is hardly a wrapper around X. 

Anyway, my point was not about quality of wrapping. It's about the fact that 
you can't fully count on someone else to maintain something. Sooner or later 
they will move on. And hence, the more people can maintain something, the 
better. My contention would be that aRts failed in large part because there 
are are very few people who can touch at least part of it, and only 1 person 
who understands all of it. Hence, broken stuff stayed broken, because even 
when people were willing to try to brave the widely different codebase, few 
could actually understand enough of it to try something. Now, you could 
probably make the case that D-BUS will be well-maintained for a very long 
amount of time, and that no-one here would have to worry about it, and that's 
fair enough, but that doesn't mean that the style of implementation has no 
significance.