Re: Moving to *Avahi* over howl

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Fri, 16.09.05 00:55, Trent Lloyd (lathiat bur st) wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 15, 2005 at 09:18:01AM -0400, JP Rosevear wrote:
> > Is there any reason not to prefer bonjour over howl now?  Apple has
> > re-licensed the client portions of the library under BSD like howl and
> > almost certainly bonjour will be better tested.
> > 
> > Initial patches that support both from hpj:
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312953
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311882
> 
> For those who don't know, I'm one of a few people behind Avahi, if you
> haven't read about the project you can go here
> http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/Avahi
> 
> I had planned to help move GNOME over to Avahi during the 2.14 release
> cycle, the following applications already work with Avahi
> 
>  - GnomeMeeting (patch)
>  - Vino (patch)
>  - Rhythmbox (cvs)
> 
> And gnome-vfs is being looked at, the reason I think the project should
> use avahi is because its clean LGPL, no iff or buts or any problems in
> that regard.

A quick addition: we're still looking for someone to adapt gnome-vfs
for avahi. I had a look on that myself, but I am not that happy with
the current state of affairs of DNS-SD support in gnome-vfs. Fixing
this in a way that makes me happy would require quite a lot of work I
am unwilling to invest right now.

So, if anyone interested in doing this work, contact us on #avahi on
freenode!

BTW: I don' see any reason why gnome should exclusively rely on a
single implementation (be it howl, or bonjour or avahi). It shouldn't
be to difficult to implement all three and let the distributos decide
what to ship. Debian/Ubuntu will probably choose Avahi, but all other
can use use what they want. (Not that I wouldn't like to see Avahi
used by all other distributions, too, since I am one of the guys
behind Avahi ;-))

In fact KDE does it similarly. You can run KDE on top of Bonjour and
alternatively on top of Avahi.

If I am right, the only DNS-SD using part in Gnome right now is
gnome-vfs?

Some Avahi PR:

Everyone should know that Avahi is simply the best mDNS-SD
implementation for Linux out there right now. It's much better
integrated into Linux than Apple's code. e.g. it uses netlink to
subscribe to local network configuration changes, which Bonjour does
not. Reacting on local network config changes is essential on
Laptops.

Avahi uses DBUS, a very convincing buzzword everybody likes.

Another magic buzzword for some (especially at Novell) is "Mono": due
to the great work of James Willcox we ship first-class, complete C#
bindings for Avahi with our upstream tarballs.

And our Glib and Qt main loop integration kicks ass, too.

Avahi offers some features that Bonjour does not (e.g. correct
reflection of mDNS traffic between subnets), but admittedly lacks some,
too. (The most prominent being "wide-area" support, which will be
implemented shortly.)

Avahi is much more than a mDNS/DNS-SD stack for desktop applications,
you can use it as embeddable stack for appliances. And that all
licensed under LGPL, instead of some non-free ASPL that is good for
flamewars only.

In short: Avahi is much more "linuxish" than Bonjour/HOWL and simply
rocks the world. Everybody should use it. Now.

Should you be convinced now and want to start to port your app to
Avahi, read the API specs now on
http://www.freedesktop.org/~lennart/doxygen/!

More information here:

http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/Avahi

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering; lennart [at] poettering [dot] de
ICQ# 11060553; GPG 0x1A015CC4; http://0pointer.de/lennart/