Re: Gnome VFS - plans for Gnome 2.8

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

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.  It has much broader range of support on UNIX systems
(mostly thanks to pushing by Apple and their Open Source
implementation), and it doesn't have the uber-annoying poor security
considerations of UPnP.  (UPnP, for example, offers a way for clients to
punch holes through your UPnP-enabled firewall automatically.  Can you
say Trojan?)

Looking at it from a UNIX-design perspective, UPnP vs Zeroconf is a lot
like SOAP vs XML-RPC.  SOAP has a metric shitload of stuff crammed into
that that 90% of people don't need, and the other 10% could've just
layered on top of XML-RPC what they were missing.

One might also think of UPnP as Zeroconf+SOAP, since UPnP provides
everything Zeroconf does and then goes in and defines a bunch of IPC
semantics and standards.  Standards nobody needs since there already
were standards for them.  (A new printing protocol?  Why not just use
IPP?)

Even if GNOME *did* want to fully support UPnP, it'll have to be in a
lot more place than just gnome-vfs.  libgnomeprint would need explicit
support, for example.  Media apps would need explicit support.  UPnP
doesn't just let you advertise basic services, it requires that you use
a bunch of domain-specific interfaces to use those services.  Ugh.

-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.