Re: dbus questions [was Re: Merging gio into glib]

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2007-11-14 at 16:44 -0500, John Ehresman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A few dbus integration questions from an application developer who is 
> somewhat familiar with gtk internals and the win32 port.
> 
> * Would gtk be usable on posix-like platforms that do not have dbus 
> installed and configured?  Does OS X fall into this category?

Sure, although they may not be able to support some features. The OS X
port doesn't even need X anymore.

> * What happens when something is added on Linux that isn't easily 
> implementable on win32, OS X, or another platform?  One could imagine 
> some sort of interface that allowed a capability to be implemented or not.

This needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis. If something only
exists on linux, does it even make sense to add it to gtk+? And if it
isn't possible to implement on some platforms, this has to be reflected
in the API (with correct failure modes for the non-supported case).

> * Where does code that interfaces with dbus or native api's go?  I think 
> most native platform specific code in the gtk+ tarball is in gdk now; 
> will gdk remain the primary place for such code?

This is also a case-by-case thing. For instace, much of modern rendering
platform specific code goes in cairo. Window handling stuff go in gdk.
Native print dialog support go in gtk.