Re: using dbus in the platform

[Alp Toker <alp atoker com>]

Brian,

I think you might have joined this discussion from the wrong angle. 
There is no real debate that using D-Bus makes sense for traditional 
desktop environments. NDesk, another GTK+ desktop environment, 
implements dozens of Freedestkop standards, including several fdo D-Bus 
specs.

The issue is that Havoc is proposing to use libdbus, his own D-Bus 
implementation, directly in GTK+. This means that desktop environments 
like NDesk which use their own D-Bus library will incur the overhead of 
multiple connections and conceptual breakage of two D-Bus 
implementations in one process.

The problem is not unique to NDesk. Some half a dozen GNOME applications 
also use NDesk.DBus or dependent libraries. Dozens of third party 
applications that are neither part of NDesk or GNOME also use 
alternative D-Bus libraries and will be affected by any decision to use 
libdbus in GTK+ proper.

There is no reason why the proposed libdbus-specific functionality can't 
be provided by some "libdesktop" library to be used by GNOME, XFCE and 
traditional desktops. This has the added benefit that such functionalty 
can simply be avoided by, say, GTK+ applications running on DirectFB, on 
deeply embedded custom OSs etc.