Re: Gnome VFS - plans for Gnome 2.8

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Mar 26, 2004, at 12:15 PM, Ian McKellar wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 16:52, James Henstridge wrote:
> > Do we know what actual large organisations are using for service
> > discovery right now?  If no one is doing service discovery right now,
> > then we can probably choose the most elegant solution.
>
> People are using Rendezvous, though basically they're only using it for
> iTunes music sharing :) And for large organisations (eg: Apple) it
> doesn't work.

The problem there is that Rendezvous is currently mDNS only.  This is 
only a limitation of Rendezvous, which is just one implementation of 
Zeroconf.  DNS-SD does not need to be limited to mDNS.

Apple is currently working on removing the mDNS restriction, so this 
problem will be gone from Rendezvous in the future.  My personally 
guess would be in the OS X 10.4 timeframe.  After that, corporate use 
may pick up a lot.

Zeroconf/Rendezvous is used a lot in non-corporate environments 
(printer, music, ichat, file sharing, etc.) already.  Implementation of 
Zeroconf which can operate using normal DNS do exist, as well, altho 
they are not popular.

> I'd like to see GNOME have a protocol agnostic service discovery API,
> but I'm not sure how possible that is.

Yay protocol agnostic API!  :)

Depending on what we want to do with it, there's no reason for it to be 
hard.  One does have to look at the LCD situation.  Namely, is all this 
API going to do is allow querying for services and publishing them?  
Service meta-information is stored/managed differently in different 
protocols.  One may need some kind of HAL-like library for this, so 
that e.g. printer meta-information can be queried/provided in a uniform 
fashion with the underlying library translating it to the 
protocol-specific formats.

> Ian
>
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