Re: D-BUS [Re: A desktop framework/daemon]

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Tue, 2003-07-22 at 19:34, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

> If you have the time and motivation I'd go ahead rather than wait.
> DBUS API as I hear isn't quite stable yet and this is the kind
> of thing desktops need.   You could always go back and use the
> DBUS API later if you're so inclined. 


Motivation is not yet a problem. Time might be a problem, motivation
will become a problem if 20 teams are going to create 20 good solutions
for one simple problem.

> I'd talk with Keith Packard on defining a standard or have it as
> a TODO on Keith's branch of Xfree if you want to go the X route.

> I don't think there is anything in DBUS that I could see that would 
> prevent it from being ported to other systems.


> > Perhaps somebody should implement something like this in a clean way.
> > This means that it might be a issue for freedesktop.org before anybody
> > even starts with that implementation.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand?

That it's more important to have a good standard than to have a good
solution in a short period of time. I am getting pretty sick of the fact
that the Linux desktop is getting cluttered with solutions and ways to
do something. This only scares youngh developers and companies.

In what desktop-environment and using what standards should one create a
larger application? How can you be sure that the application can be
deployed on as much computers as possible? How can you be sure that the
used technology will not be deprecated in five years?

At this moment not one Linux desktop environment is answering that
question (I hope freedesktop.org is a solution). This basically means
that not one single larger company will even think about porting desktop
applications from for example Windows to the Linux desktop.

So what I mean is ..

I don't want to create yet another technology that will be forked 100
times meaning that it will only render the linux desktop completely
useless. (ps. Replace "linux" with BSD or Solaris or whatever kernel you
want to run on your desktop computer).



Note again that the idea is to create a very general purpose desktop
daemon. Not only a Clipboard Manager. That Clipboard Manager-thing will
only be a prove of concept. 

I would like it even more if that desktop daemon or framework would be
build by a large team of opensource developers and supported by all
desktop-environments.

Once it's finished I can start creating me Clipboard Manager on top of
it. And the browser-dudes can start building their bookmark system on
top of it. And the messager-dudes can start building their list of
online users on top of it. And the ... 

I am not saying that this would/will happen but it might become a nice
bridge for a lot issues between KDE and GNOME (and other desktop
environments).

I do know that "Bonobo" could be used but then again, the KDE-dudes will
not agree to make the component a major dependancy of their
desktop-environment. I fear that D-BUS will have the same problem on
some Operating Systems (kernels) but I don't know very much about D-BUS,
so don't belive me.


ps. What I am actually saying is.. we "neeeeeed" to start agreeing on a
lot issues on the Linux desktop. If that means breaking old applications
and doing lots of work on the current ones .. then that is what it
means. (well actually it means that we have been doing a very bad job
designing our applications and libraries and for that we should be
punished hard).


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
work: Philip dot VanHoof at cronos dot be
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org