get on d-bus!

[Benedikt Meurer]

Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 06:54:23PM -0800, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> 
>>right, so no one actually answered the question i cared most about.  can 
>>i depend on d-bus for xfdesktop in CVS?  call me lazy, but reinventing 
>>the IPC wheel with a unix socket just bores the hell out of me.
> 
> Well, you'd still have to decide on the messages to support, etc. I doubt if
> it would be much different. But, I do agree that a unified IPC mechanism would
> be very good for Xfce.
> 
> I'm hoping that we can make some kind of framework to make Xfce fully
> scriptable (xfce3 had that I think, by using fvwm style modules). Anyway,
> that's a bit off-topic.
> 
> So, I think it would be a good idea to use D-Bus. I would like to hear
> Benedikt opinion too, since he has most experience with it.

Well, as I already explained, D-BUS isn't API-stable now. Havoc is 
changing method names and such (e.g. 'service' is now 'name', although I 
think the term 'service' is better, but... whatever). If you are using 
D-BUS, you need to be prepared to change stuff.

I already suggested Brian to use D-BUS for Xfmedia, instead of 
reinventing the wheel, so, yes, of course, get on d-bus! But be prepared 
for breakage.

BTW: You can save yourself a lot of time and trouble, if you read the 
documentation (esp. the protocol specification) first. That gives you a 
good idea of the D-BUS world and terminology (yes, its different from 
CORBA!).

And one last thing: Don't make applications depend on the session bus! 
The applications should work, no matter if the session bus is present or 
not. E.g., if somebody starts xfdesktop outside a dbus session, then 
xfdesktop IPC won't work, but the user should still be able to use 
xfdesktop to manage the background.

> 	Jasper

Benedikt