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

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 09:43 -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:

> > (Crappy write-up, but I just haven't had time to sort it out. Sorry!)
> 
> GUnique already uses D-Bus (with bacon as a backup).  So, how is your
> proposal different than GUnique?  (Other than startup-notification not
> being mentioned in your proposal yet?)

One thing that a hard dependency on D-Bus could provide is more ability
to extend the mechanism to provide for additional application needs.

A generic mechanism can provide handle the needs of gnome-terminal or 
gedit; but not every command that you might want to pass to a desktop
singleton is "open a new window".

I think it would be a little strange from an API point of view to have
to do one thing (GUnique) to get "open a new window" functionality,
and then entirely something else to get "scriptable singleton"
functionality.

Is "extensible" compatible with hiding the gory details of start-up
notification timestamps? I don't know. I don't have a good sense
of what a prototypical D-Bus exporting application looks like. 

What I've seen tends to be a bit messy, especially in C.

						- Owen