Re: Moving to bonjour over howl

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Fri, 16.09.05 10:01, Alexander Larsson (alexl redhat com) wrote:

> > Avahi is going to end up much better for us. It integrates with our
> > main loop; talks via D-BUS; has bindings in C# and Python (and
> > probably other stuff); is LGPL (all of it); and all in all looks
> > superior to any existing technology we are using (have a look at the
> > existing DNS-SD code in GNOME-VFS).
> 
> I'm sure your hot new code is a thousand times nicer than the dns-sd
> stuff in GNOME-VFS. However, that code is the way it is for a reason.
> Since this code is used by gnome-vfs modules it needs to be threadsafe,
> it can't rely on the glib mainloop, and it needs to supply synchronous
> operations to match the synchronous gnome-vfs file operations.

This cuts no ice.

Avahi doesn't depend on the GLIB main loop. In fact it is not
difficult to use Avahi without any real main loop at all. As a matter
of fact we offer a first class Qt3/Qt4 main loop adapter for
Avahi. 

Avahi doesn't use any threading/locking primitives itself. However,
this doesn't mean it isn't thread safe. As long as you use Avahi from
a single thread at the same time only it is perfectly legal to use it
in a multi-threaded environment. In fact the avahi-sharp bindings use
Avahi that way. A minimal event loop is run in its own thread and
the little locking needed is done entirely with C# locking
primitives. 

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering; lennart [at] poettering [dot] de
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