Re: New module decisions for 2.16

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 14:31 -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:
>     => strong concerns about the dbus# bindings (John reports that
>        neither he nor the original dbus# author, Joe Shaw, think that
>        dbus-sharp was a particularly good binding and that it hasn't
>        been updated since the 0.3x releases)

Just to clarify: I wasn't the author of the dbus-mono bindings, although
I did do some work on them and maintained them for a couple of months.
No one has done any work on them since I stopped maintaining them 14
months ago.

In my opinion they need to be rewritten.  The code is rather hard to
follow and makes some assumptions on D-Bus's architecture from the 0.3x
days that hasn't been updated.  Perhaps worst of all there are some
serious object lifecycle issues which weren't considered in the original
design.  The API in many ways mirrors the low level C API, which
generally isn't a good one to expose to programmers.  Lastly, it
depended upon a glib main loop for its processing -- fine for gtk-sharp
apps, but it still needs its own native main loop processing.

>     => IN, assuming gtk# gets in AND a sane long term solution for
>        dbus# is proposed soon (or that dbus# is removed as a
>        dependency for Tomboy) -- otherwise kick it back out before
>        2.16.0

Unless someone steps up to develop new bindings or at least maintain the
old ones, it's unlikely that there will be a long-term plan for
dbus-mono in the short-term.  The bindings have been removed from the
official D-Bus releases, so this may force someone's hand.

Joe