Re: Moving to *Avahi* over howl

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 20:27 -0400, JP Rosevear wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 11:48 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 
> > Do all implementations have the same features, or do we have to cater to
> > a least common denominator?
> > 
> > It seems like this is not really the case, at least some comments in
> > this thread says Avahi is more powerful. A least common denominator
> > gives us a less powerful API and possibly a less featurefull desktop.
> > And there is a risk that apps start using Avahi anyway as they need some
> > feature, and then we're not portable anymore.
> 
> This is exactly whats occurring with the cross platform status icon api
> though isn't it? (I don't think I'm for the lowest common denominator
> there either, but I haven't read all the arguments).

There might be a lowest common denominator thing going on there, I'm not
sure. But in that case one can hardly claim we should just declare the
freedesktop X status icon standards as what gtk+ should use, as there is
no way it would run on e.g. Windows. Its quite possible that Avahi can
be ported to windows and used directly by Gnome on Win32 or OSX,
although pretty strange...

Yeah, its not always obvious what is best. For instance, it might be
nice to have a Gnome wrapper for avahi just to make the interface more
"gnomey" (easy glib mainloop integration, use GObject/signals etc).

Anyway, having discussed this for a while I think I have made up my
mind. I think we should have a Gnome-style wrapper, supporting at least
the most common dns-sd operations, which can use avahi or any other API
beneath. Then most of the desktop can use this, and only if we need to
do something really uncommon do we need to use avahi directly, and that
could be made optional. The reason I think so is that we really want a
wrapper anyway, to make the API fit gnome better, and if you already
have the wrapper its not really much of an additional cost to support
other APIs. The extra maintainance burden of "non-standard" backends
fall on the users of them and don't hurt the mainstream Gnome. 


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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an obese one-eyed sorceror for the 21st century. She's a disco-crazy 
paranoid bounty hunter with a knack for trouble. They fight crime!