Re: using dbus in the platform

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> As for multiple implementations, why can't gtk have a simple pluggable
> IPC module, sorta like the IM modules or GtkFileSystem?  I know, I know,
> it's one more layer of potentially-unneeded abstraction, one more API
> that needs to be carefully designed since it can't really be changed
> later, etc...  But it would make it possible for ndesk (for example) to
> provide its own IPC backend (a thin wrapper around the ndesk dbus
> library, in this case) and avoid using libdbus at all.

I think what you want to be pluggable is the backend for say "show an 
URL". To show an URL, GTK could use dbus, or could call a Windows API, 
or whatever.

The idea here is not to have an "official GTK IPC system" - it's to have 
GTK use platform APIs, which may happen to use an IPC system. For 
example, the graphics APIs on "normal" Linux (not embedded) generally 
use the X11 protocol, so to do graphics on that platform, GTK uses the 
X11 protocol. On other platforms, it doesn't. dbus is pretty much 
exactly analogous.

To simplify all the platform special-casing, we do have freedesktop.org 
and try to keep some of the open source desktop platforms such as GNOME, 
KDE, XFCE in sync, which means less work for GTK+. D-Bus is certainly 
intended to be part of this shared stuff, at least for somem subset of 
open source platforms.

To the extent there are other open source platforms that don't fit in to 
some of the existing specs, such as Hildon or NDesk, GTK+ will have to 
special-case them when they are different, just as it has to special 
case GNOME vs. Windows vs. Mac vs. DirectFB.

Havoc