Re: Shipping Vera with 2.4

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> > decent glib-like API layered on top of it to hide the complexity should
> > not be hard either (gconf is a proof of a simple API being creatable for
> > this purpose.
> > 
> > (Also: there is already a more general bus-like system in CORBA called
> > the event service, but people might want something as thin as possible).
> > Anyways, my 2 cents.
> 
> I agree completely that you could build a bus system with CORBA and
> ORBit. Here is why I didn't do that:
> 
>  - current ORBit/Bonobo ABI has reentrancy/lifecycle bustage

Which can be conveniently wrapped around an API that would take care of
this.  I do not believe this is technically impossible, but might
require some careful coding (and its good that now people know where
these pitfalls are).

>  - KDE is categorically unwilling to use ORBit, and very close to
>    categorically unwilling to use CORBA at all


>  - I would expect some other large frameworks (Mozilla, etc.) 
>    to have similar views to KDE

I am not so sure.  OpenOffice can talk to CORBA just fine and Netscape
had the largest deployed corba ORB in the world (It was taken out of
Mozilla because it was a third party technology).   So it is not really
completely out of the question for these large projects. 

>  - CORBA/Bonobo does not seem workable for a systemwide bus, which is
>    the whole justification I have for allocating time to this

You might have noticed that I carefully avoided the word Bonobo on my
original message. 

Anyways, if you want to go for short, you do not even need the C CORBA
binding.  You can use directly the engine which lies underneat Orbit
(Michael pointed this to us when we were looking at doing a
CORBA-for-Mono implementation: all the hard bits are accessible *without
the C binding in ORBit2).

Miguel