Re: LibUnique as blessed dependency

[Alex Jones <alex weej com>]

Havoc

I've been promoting this idea for about a year now! You may recall
postings to this list about this topic from last July.

My own thought experiments have led me to believe that one process may
want to provide multiple "applications", for example F-Spot's basic
image viewer, and the F-Spot browser. You could either do this by
requesting two bus names, or by having separate addressable objects on
the bus. The idea on this Live page deals with the latter, but I'm not
100% sure it's the best approach. (You could, for example, have
org.gnome.MyApp and org.gnome.MyApp.Preferences names owned by the same
DBus client.)

http://live.gnome.org/DesktopAppsAsDBusServices

Due to lack of interest, it's been on a backburner. Some people
mentioned that it sounded like it was turning into Bonobo Activation,
and that "we've been down that path before", which was quite
demotivating to hear. Still, if you'd like to help me resurrect
something, Jabber me!

<xmpp:alex weej com>

On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 14:24 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Another thing we can enable here:
> 
> - in .desktop files have a X-Launchable-Service=org.gnome.MyAppName
> - this means the app supports the Launch() method
> 
> At that point, the panel can ignore the Exec= line and just do Launch() 
> directly. This eliminates:
> - fork/exec and dynamically linking the app
> - connecting to the dbus session bus in the exec'd process
> - connecting to the X server in gtk_init() in the exec'd process
> 
> This init stuff may be a noticeable short delay for users, and isn't 
> needed since the app will just be forwarding to its existing instance 
> then exiting.
> 
> If the panel is already on the session bus, and the app is already on 
> the session bus, then calling Launch() is extremely cheap and instantaneous.
> 
> I don't know if this is user-visible but it might be, especially for 
> apps with lots of initialization and setup, or that link to lots of 
> libraries.
> 
> Havoc
> 
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
-- 
Alex Jones
http://alex.weej.com/