Re: Committed patch to bonobo-activation

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman sun com>]

>For GNOME 2.0 I plan to make bonobo-activation-server exit after a
>certain period of idle time and get launched on demand. I also have
>plans to incompatible change the private IDL (for instance to remove
>use of CORBA contexts) so I would rather people not rely on those
>interfaces.

Maciej:

I have a suggestion about the 'private IDL'.  If we can remove the CORBA-context 
dependency, I don't see a problem with it remaining 'private' in 2.0 in the sense 
that it is not guaranteed to be stable across versions, since our at-spi (which is 
the only dependent) is part of the platform also, thereform any interdependencies 
are not 'public API'.

The term used within Sun for this sort of dependency is 'consolidation private' 
which basically means that two API maintainers have agreed to sync up with each 
other and tolerate the resulting dependencies and inter-version breakage.  I have 
no problem if, in the short term, the version of at-spi that ships with 2.0 
requires the 2.0 bonobo-activation version, and the 2.2 at-spi requires the 2.2 
bonobo-activation library, since 

(a) they will ordinarily be co-packaged;
(b) only the at-spi package will be affected;
(c) not allowing the dependency creates significant technical issues that are 
likely to cause worse breakage.

Of course at some point it would be nice for the API to become stable and 'public', 
but all we need is a gentleman's agreement, we don't mind if the API is still 
evolving as long as we know what it is and we can arrange for things to stabilize 
sometime after 2.0 FCS.

I don't see a good alternative, binding to external C libraries is really not 
desireable when shipping a Java component, it is likely to be at least as much 
trouble as the other solutions in terms of compatibility and it introduces other 
technical problems.  As for launching the activation-server, the nicest way to do 
that is via an "exec" from the JVM if the server is not found, there is then no 
binary dependency and we just need some bootstrapping script/exe in the path.  Such 
a thing is also configurable via java properties files, and need not introduce any 
race conditions for other Gnome apps.

best regards,

Bill

> - Maciej
>

------
Bill Haneman x19279
Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
Sun Microsystems Ireland