Re: Shipping Vera with 2.4

["Gustavo J. A. M. " Carneiro <gjc inescporto pt>]

On Qui, 2003-02-27 at 17:00, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 	One of the things that amazes me about D/BUS is that - having been
> > patronizingly lectured extensively in the past about how "a string is an
> > API" - it seems that D/BUS is essentially a "send a string" transport.
> > Is there really no formal contract specification language ? and/or
> > suggestions for and/or descriptions of such ? I couldn't find such a
> > thing in the documentation. You're going to need IDL - hey, you could
> > even compile that IDL to some typesafe stubs / skels !
> 
> There probably will be an IDL, yes, and typesafe stubs/skels, on the
> level of the GLib/Qt integration libs.

  [Disclaimer: this is just my mostly-uninformed opinion.]

  If you have IDL and stubs/skels, then is it much different from CORBA?
  There are basically 2 paradigms in distributed systems:
	1. Message-oriented: PVM, MPI, etc.
	2. Remote procedures: RPC, CORBA, ...

  However, remote procedures are more intuitive and less tedious to
program. Plus, you can build a message-based system on top of remote
procedure calls (I know, the reverse is also true).

  Is ORBit slow? If it is:
	1. I'm sure it can be optimized.
	2. It doesn't matter *that* much. Even if you made ORBit 10x faster,
would it make GNOME faster? I doubt anyone would notice the difference.

  [Warning: flame material follows]

  I get the impression some people are trying merge GNOME with KDE a
little too forcefully. There have been historically two major
differences between them: Gtk+ vs Qt; CORBA vs IPC. (ok, also C vs C++,
but doesn't matter much to me personally).

  Does unification at this level bring any end-user advantage? I don't
think so.  But I'm sure it brings "end-programmer" disadvantages.  But I
could be wrong, in which case I'm sure a CORBA-to-DCOP adaptation layer
could be easily developed (at least as easily as developing D/BUS).

  At the very least, don't force D/BUS upon programmers. Some people
still want to use CORBA. Please let the GNOME 2.x remain stable for a
long time!

  Regards.

-- 
Gustavo Joćo Alves Marques Carneiro
<gjc inescporto pt> <gustavo users sourceforge net>