Re: Gnome VFS - plans for Gnome 2.8

[George Karabin <gkarabin pobox com>]

On Mar 25, 2004, at 9:51 AM, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 12:10, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 17:55, George Karabin wrote:
> > > Have you looked at UPnP (http://www.upnp.org/)? It looks fairly
> > > heavyweight, but it's targeted at some of the same sorts of things as
> > > zeroconf/Rendezvous. I imagine the initial interest in mDNS and 
> > > webdav
> > > is for network file sharing. A short and sweet example of how UPnP
> > > might be used for something similar is MediaServer
> > > (http://www.upnp.org/standardizeddcps/mediaserver.asp). I'm sure 
> > > there
> > > are plenty of others.
> >
> > Wow. That looks pretty overengineered. xml, soap and all sorts of
> > buzzwords. :)
>
> It's Microsoft-endorsed.  What do you expect?  ;-)
>
> I might be biased, but I think working towards Zeroconf is a much 
> better
> use of time.

Zeroconf is simpler and more UNIXy, and it'd be the way to go in a 
technical vacuum. That said, I'd guess that (standard) GNOME has better 
user-level support for SMB than NFS for a reason: SMB is used by more 
"enterprise" servers than NFS, and more enterprise clients want to use 
SMB shares.

I couldn't begin to guess which technology will end up winning the 
consumer electronics service discovery "market", but sadly, I'd guess 
that the dominating technology won't be chosen based on purely 
technical merit. Hedging bets by supporting both zeroconf and UPnP (if 
those doing the work have time) is probably not a much worse use of 
time than supporting zeroconf alone.

- George