Re: Proposal and RFC: DAL, the Desktop Abstraction Layer

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 14:53 +0100, Ikke wrote:
> Hi Gnome desktop hackers,
> 
> This morning I sent an email[1] to the XDG list at freedesktop.org,
> explaining some new idea I got and I'd like to hack on.
> 

Heh, glad you posted here. I see that for my xdg account: "Note: your
list delivery is currently disabled; it was disabled for unknown
reasons." What the heck is that about.

> I'd like to hear your thoughts on this too, as it won't be very useful
> to write something like this if nobody is going to use it.

As Mike Hearn says, I think what you described is simply what the D-BUS
session bus is for. There's no need that I see for an additional DAL. If
D-BUS doesn't do this as-is we need to change D-BUS so it does. This is
the whole point of D-BUS.

Here is how it works. D-BUS has services. So example hypothetical
services are org.freedesktop.Screensaver or org.freedesktop.TextEditor.
(Services are aliases or names for applications.) When defining a name,
you specify what apps that use that name will support. For example, we
would document that if you name yourself org.freedesktop.Screensaver,
you have to support the method SetEnabled(bool).

It's useful to collect and document these kinds of interfaces, for sure.
But I don't think a new library or code is needed on top of D-BUS itself
(other than the various D-BUS bindings).

Havoc