Exporting shared data in C

[Benedikt Meurer]

juha wrote:
>>>The desktop database should be cached in a db (i.e. tdb, which Thunar
>>>uses, is pretty fast). The menu structure should not be cached, but
>>>instead the parsing/merging should be optimized later.
>>
>>Ah, tdb looks like it should be easy to adapt later. So I'll work on
>>loading the desktop entries etc. first and will look into caching
>>afterwards. Thanks for the hint.
> 
> We probably need some kind of db for Orage, too in the
> next release. I think it would make sense to standardise
> Xfce file access needs to a common system?
> 
> Is Thunar using tdb from the os and assuming it is installed?
> Or has it been included in Thunar? Perhaps we should add
> tdb as a general tool for all Xfce projects? Or make it a
> requirement?

Thunar currently ships its own (slightly patched) copy of tdb. We could
put that in libxfce4util and add a wrapper module (xfce-db or something).

> Perhaps we could use it to store parameters also...if we
> replace xfce-mcs-manager some day.

Ehm, not tdb is not really suitable here.

> Also, I think we should standardise the communication method.
> DBUS seems to be used in several places, but it has not been
> listed as requirement nor is it included with Xfce. (We are planning
> also to split Orage as a daemon and UI part, so we will need a
> message system also.)

Well, D-Bus the defacto standard here today in the Unix/Linux desktop,
and thats what all distributions (except for some exotic) ship by
default, so yes, use D-Bus. Whether or not the dependency is optional is
up to you to decide - splitting into daemon and ui however looks like a
hard dependency :-).

> I think it would save memory resources and make Xfce applications
> more integrated if we agree on these, too and perhaps even build
> a common library around them?

As said, we could put tdb in libxfce4util, or maybe libexo (libxfce4util
is also used by applications like xfwm4 that will most certainly never
need to access any .tdb file :-), but that's already for 4.6.

> /Juha

Benedikt