Re: GUnique [Was: gnome-utils branched for GNOME 2.16]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:
> One advantage of using X would be that it works for remote X clients
> too.

I think it'd be a mistake to start using X for all ipc for that reason - 
you'd end up never using dbus, and X is kind of a sucky IPC.

To solve this for dbus there are two basic approaches, one is to make 
ssh forward DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and have the session bus listen on 
tcp, the other is to write an X11 transport that tunnels a bus 
connection through X. Neither is very hard in theory though I grant 
neither is already done.

The dbus bus name stuff is essentially designed for the unique app 
use-case - though, I grant it's modeled on X selections which are also 
essentially designed for this use-case.

Either way, I think it's important to make the bus name or X selection 
name look "sane" when not used through the GUnique interface, i.e. on 
dbus the bus name for Evolution should be something like 
"org.gnome.Evolution" and on X the selection name should be something 
like "_GNOME_EVOLUTION_INSTANCE" (btw, in both cases a --replace mode 
would be nice, especially for debugging, and is natively/easily supported)

Havoc