RE: Beagle Networking / Beagle Win32 Port

[Alex Graveley <alex beatniksoftware com>]

Fredrik,

WOW! Great work dude!  Keep it up.

-Alex

On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 18:20 +0100, Fredrik Hedberg wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A nice, but not-that-fancy, screenshot;
> http://users.avafan.com/~fredrik/activity/archive/2004/Nov-21.html
> 
> Builds with cygwin, runs without it.
> 
> Done up to now: 
> - Abstracted GConf into a Configuration.cs to use windows registry and
> gconf where applicable.
> - Use System.Management and System.Diagnostics in SystemInformation.cs
> - Changed all Inotify code to use System.IO.FileSystemWatcher (started a
> IFileWatcher implementation based on INotify for mono class lib, but not
> finished yet)
> - Use SQLite when ExtendedAttributes are not available (Jon and Joe G
> was working on this I think), but there's prolly a better way to do
> this... Perhaps a windows specific thing?
> - Extended the NetworkInterface and added network support to Query.exe
> when a DBus daemon is not found.
> - Temporarily disabled stuff of no relevance (unix only queryables)
> 
> What should be done:
> - Outlook/AIM/WAB & whatever queryables needed for windows
> - Add a BestWindow and BestTray based on SWF.
> - Port DBus to windows. (queries work now, but the RCI and DBus query
> interfaces are disabled if a DBus daemon is not found.
> - Port stuff I disabled like the screensaver and gecko stuff
> - Make some misc stuff more generic, such as tiles (mail, imlog, blog)
> - Port filters based on unix libs
> 
> /Fred
> 
> On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 11:13 -0500, Nat Friedman wrote:
> > [ Cc'ing the list on this discussion. ]
> > 
> > Hi Joerg,
> > 
> > On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 11:52 +0100, Battermann, Joerg wrote:
> > 
> > > by browsing through the beagle sources, I think dbus is used on more
> > > places than the network implementation. 
> > 
> > Yes.  Beagle uses a client/server architecture: the indexing and query
> > engine runs on a dedicated daemon, and any process can open a query and
> > get results remotely from this daemon. The IPC mechanism that we use
> > today is D-BUS. This means that we don't force application authors to
> > link their applications against the entire Beagle infrastructure;
> > instead they can just link against a lightweight IPC client.
> > 
> > So D-BUS is pretty fundamental to the way Beagle works right now.
> > 
> > We use D-BUS because it seems to be the popular thing to do in the Linux
> > Desktop world today, and because it is a fairly simple IPC mechanism. We
> > could equally have used web services or a hand-rolled system, but as
> > long as everyone is moving toward D-BUS, it seemed like a sane decision.
> > 
> > If this D-BUS momentum does indeed continue to build, then I think the
> > desire for a Windows port will go also.
> > 
> > In general terms, we are VERY open to the idea of porting Beagle to
> > Windows, and would entertain patches to that end.
> > 
> > Speaking specifically of D-BUS, Jon looked into porting it to Windows
> > and spoke to Havoc about the idea already. He learned that D-BUS already
> > has a fairly well-abstracted system layer and porting it to a new
> > operating system is essentially a matter of writing one file.
> > 
> > > So is inotify. 
> > 
> > inotify is, in some ways, an imitation of the intent of the Windows
> > ChangeNotify system. So there is an analogous mechanism under Windows
> > already. 
> > 
> > I think the right approach here would be to extend Mono's
> > FileSystemWatcher class to do the following:
> > 
> > On Linux
> > 
> >         - If inotify exists, use inotify.
> >         
> >         - Else, if Fam exists, use that.
> >         
> >         - Else, either poll or do nothing at the user's option.
> >         
> > On Windows
> > 
> >         - Use ChangeNotify.
> >         
> > Then we would simply be able to use FileSystemWatcher from anywhere and
> > it would work. 
> > 
> > > Beagle basically
> > > relies on those so we either write a wrapper around beagle for windows
> > > or get rid of these dependencies by implenting other solutions, which
> > > would most likely result in branching/patching-hell to stay up to date
> > > with the beagle main source-tree.
> > 
> > I think if you do it right, like I described above, it wouldn't be so
> > bad.
> > 
> > > I'll dig a bit deeper into the beagle sources this weekend, and see what
> > > I can up with before giving any definite statements.
> > 
> > Excellent. Good luck.
> > 
> > Nat
> > 
> >