Re: [Utopia] Why not split gnome-volume-manager in two

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi Kristof,

On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 03:40 +0000, Kristof Vansant wrote:
> Wouldn't it be interesting to split gnome-volume-manager in 2 parts.
> one part that runs without gnome or gtk stuff. Glib should be allowed :)
> 
> and a part running in gnome.
> 
> We could let these two programmes talk to each other using d-bus.

In doing so, it would introduce a new level of indirection (by creating
yet another daemon-client pair) and make the code much more complex.

Today gnome-volume-manager is only 1349 lines of C (of C!), so it is a
very simple piece of code.  The majority of the work is being done by
HAL, which is already a daemon, is already desktop independent, and
sends out d-bus messages.  So g-v-m is really just a policy piece which
intentionally pulls together device info from HAL and GNOME technologies
like GTK+ and GConf.

I would estimate that it'd take a moderately experienced KDE hacker one
day to get something of a kde-volume-manager working, and probably no
more than a weekend to get it to the same level of functionality if they
were looking at the g-v-m source.

Because of the small size of g-v-m, this is a case where I don't think
that sharing code between GNOME and KDE would be particularly
productive.  It seems to me that a shared specification would make a lot
more sense here.

Thanks,
Joe