Re: Gnome VFS - plans for Gnome 2.8

[Ian McKellar <yakk yakk net>]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 09:38, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> On Mar 26, 2004, at 12:15 PM, Ian McKellar wrote:
> > 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.

That is true. I wonder if that new dynamic DNS thing thats in recent
versions of BIND would play nicely with DNS-SD...
> 
> 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.

Do you have any idea what mechanism they're planning on using? 
> >
> > 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?  

The way I envisioned it was to have a library like libgnetwork that let
you describe sockets you want to listen on and have that magically
published however we know how or describe (and obviously list) the
service you want to connect to and get a socket to that.

> 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.

No, I think that's best taken care of at a higher level - in the case of
printing we have libgnomeprint (or ideally CUPS) to handle the various
domain-specific metadata schemas. I'm not sure how other discovery
mechanism publish metadata but dns-sd uses a simple name/value pair
list. (and a curse on whoever decided to make iChat violate the dns-sd
spec for TXT metadata).

Ian