Re: Moving to bonjour over howl

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 17:36 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Thu, 22.09.05 10:06, Alexander Larsson (alexl redhat com) wrote:

> > A nicer solution would do just one query and iterate it manually for 200
> > msecs and then "convert" it to an asynchronous query, but that might be
> > tricky.
> 
> In some other mail you stressed that gnome-vfs modules must not rely
> on the glib main loop. Now you say yourself that you use it for your
> "background query". 

gnome-vfs uses the mainloop itself for e.g. asynchronous operations, so
its pretty common (and expected, for ui apps) to have a mainloop
running. But some apps don't (e.g. command line apps). What we generally
do is never rely on a mainloop to get at least some data, but allow more
features if the mainloop is availible. For instance, things that read
gconf settings will only get gconf key changes if you have a mainloop
running, otherwise we always use the value read at startup (because
gconf callbacks happen in idle handlers). Apps without a mainloop are
generally not long-running (they tend to be command line apps), so this
is not a big problem.

> Relying on some special user app running for gnome-vfs to work is not
> the cleanest thing to do. Consider XFCE or some other DE adopting
> gnome-vfs. Unless they offer an always-running nautilus counterpart,
> the dns-sd module would be rather sluggish.

This is a non-issue. Either XFCE doesn't display the dns-sd shares at
all, and there is no problem, or they expose it in their file manager
(its unlikely that any other app would expose it), meaning the query is
running for as long as the user is able to view the dns-sd shares. At
most we'll start a new query each time the user starts the file manager,
which is even likely to be always running. 

I don't understand what sort of bizarre use-case you're thinking of that
would ever make this a problem at all in reality. Maybe a desktop
without a file manager that has a script running "gnomevfs-ls
dns-sd://local/" in a loop? In practice, this is just not a problem.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a fast talking pirate cat burglar with a robot buddy named Sparky. She's 
a provocative wisecracking wrestler who can talk to animals. They fight crime!