Re: Moving to *Avahi* over howl

[Trent Lloyd <lathiat bur st>]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2005 at 10:23:24AM +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 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).

Well mainloop integration is already pretty easy, however a GObject
interface could be nice, and is something I may put some time into

last check davyd was doing something with this so I might see where he
got to.

Trent

> 
> 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. 
> 
> 
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>  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! 
> 
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-- 
Trent Lloyd <lathiat bur st>
Bur.st Networking Inc.