Re: Moving to *Avahi* over howl

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Mon, 19.09.05 12:48, James Henstridge (james jamesh id au) wrote:

> >I doubt this a good idea. Avahi's DBUS interface reflects what Avahi
> >is capable of and is in no way a generic DNS-SD API. In fact, Avahi is
> >more powerful than either Howl or the Bonjour in many
> >respects. Writing a bridge to access Howl/Bonjour via that DBUS API
> >would be exceptionally kludgy if not impossible.
> >  
> >
> Okay. Are you saying "Bonjour/Howl would not be able to implement the
> full Avahi dbus API" or "the subset of the Avahi dbus API covering the
> common functionality of Avahi/Bonjour/Howl could not be used to write
> useful programs"?

The former.

> If it is just the first, then this idea could still be useful. It would
> also make the Avahi client API more desirable:
> 
>     * for simple service publishing/discovery, it can interoperate with
>       whatever responder is running on the system (with the appropriate
>       dbus shim).
>     * provides advanced service discovery when used in conjunction with
>       the Avahi responder.

Hrm. So effectively you suggest implementing an additional,
simplified version of the Avahi DBUS API that might be implemented by
HOWL or Bonjour (or some thin bus-activated DBUS daemon)?

I guess I am not convinced by this idea. Beyond the mere API the
semantics of of the implementation differ quite a lot. (especially
when it comes to publishing services)

Would anyone be really willing to write such an implementation for
Apple's mDNSResponder? (I certainly not.) If actually somebody is
willing to work on it we could certainly agree on some basic, common
API. Using DBUS "interfaces" it would be easy to support both APIs
without duplicating too much code in Avahi.

Lennart

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