[Setup-tool-hackers] Re: Shipping Vera with 2.4

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> > Onthe other hand, language binding to a large variety of languages for CORBA exist
> > now, it is well known and understood technology while d-bus is for the most part
> > really a ugly IPC hack. Even if CORBA is not the appropriate ipc mrthof for some
> > case, that still doesn't mean inventing yet another ipc protocol makes any kind of
> > sence. Plenty already do exist, and there is complete lack of evidence the world
> > needs a new one.
> 
> Did your travels take you to Goa or something? Have you even looked at
> D-BUS or are you just trolling?

I always wanted to have a Bus system in Gnome (I told so to Preston
Brown when we met in Boston a few years ago, something inspired on dcop
at the time). 

But this new bus system re-implemented a lot of good existing
technology: a new rpc system (which is line-based, with base-64 encoding
required for all arguments to the simple commands) and has its own data
encoding system.  

The data encoding system is a super set of GConf.  Basic types, plus
arrays of types.  There is no consideration for complex data types
(which really is not that much work on top of this, but I can see why
people wanted to keep it small).

The sizes of a non-1.0 project like dbus (dbus 0.4 here) are a bit
surprising for something which is supposed to be very small:



-rwxr-xr-x    1 miguel   miguel       8532 Feb 28 17:34 libdbus-glib-1.so.0.0.0*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 miguel   miguel     146012 Feb 28 17:34 libdbus-1.so.0.0.0*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 miguel   miguel      17232 Feb 28 17:35 libORBitCosNaming-2.so.0*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 miguel   miguel     241600 Feb 28 17:35 libORBit-2.so.0*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 miguel   miguel      69836 Feb 28 17:36 libbonobo-activation.so.4*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 miguel   miguel       4036 Feb 28 18:06 libORBitutil.so.0.5.17*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 miguel   miguel      28136 Feb 28 18:03 liblinc.so.1.0.0*

Comparing the mature orbit/cosnaming/bonobo-activation/linc vs the size
of the still non-1.0 dbus is interesting.  The total sizes for
unstripped libraries are:

	Orbit family: 360,840
	d-bus family: 154,544

So it is almost half the size of our CORBA implementation at this
point.  If things keep growing, I could see it matching the size of
ORBit.

A bus-like system should not be too hard to build with CORBA, and a
decent glib-like API layered on top of it to hide the complexity should
not be hard either (gconf is a proof of a simple API being creatable for
this purpose.

(Also: there is already a more general bus-like system in CORBA called
the event service, but people might want something as thin as possible).
Anyways, my 2 cents.
Miguel.

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