[avahi] GAIM support for iChat Bonjour features

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 29.06.05 11:55, juanjo molinero (jjmolinero at gmail.com) wrote:

> Hi,
>    my name is Juanjo Molinero and I am currently working in a Bonjour
> plugin for GAIM as part of the Google Summer of Code. Mark Doliner of
> the GAIM team start this plugin coding its own mDNS support, but now
> we think that would be better to rely in some external daemon.
>     In order to use the one your are trying to program, I would like
> to know how far is your code from a fully functional version (any
> release date?), and if there are any plans to release it with the
> major Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, ...).

As lathiat already wrote: the avahi mDNS/DNS-SD stack is complete and
ready to be released. What is missing is the DBUS based client API for
the avahi daemon.

Since the client API (libavahi-client) will resemble the API of the
mDNS stack itself (libavahi-core), you might start using that API
first, and switch later to avahi-client.

If all these different parts of the avahi suite are't clear to you,
perhaps this graphic will help you to understand how all those parts
of avahi play together:

http://freedesktop.org/~lennart/overview.png

The red rectangles are not yet available. The white rectangles have
already been implemented and are tested and ready for relase . The
gray rectangles are components of other software.

Since all these component name are probably a little cryptic, a quick
overview:

libavahi-common - a library containing some function used both by
        clients to the avahi-daemon and the mDNS stack itself.
libavahi-core - a library implement a flexible mDNS/DNS-SD stack. The
        most prominent consumer is avahi-daemon. Primarily useful for
        devlopers of embedded applications. This stack is very avanced
        and has some uncommon features like mDNS reflection 
avahi-discover - a tool for enumerating all available services on the
        local LAN. Its links directly agaings libavahi-core,
        i.e. embedds its own mDNS stack. You should use it only for
        debugging, since it's not a good idea to run multiple mDNS
        stack simultaneously on the same machine
avahi-daemon - the avahi daemon which makes use of libavahi-core to
        implement and mDNS stack which is accessible by different
        ways:
        - System administrators may put short XML fragments in
          /etc/avahi/services to publish semi-static services (e.g. SSH)
        - A so called "simple protocol" whith a very limited command
          set which is used exclusively by nss-mdns (to resolve host
          names via mDNS) and avahi-dnsconfd
        - The DBUS interface for normal clients (like nautilus or gaim)
          which is a IPC wrapper around the functions provided by
          libavahi-core - Not yet finished
libavahi-client - A minimal wrapper around the DBUS API to ease its
         usage. Hides the DBUS internals completel. - N yet finished
nss-mdns - a libc NSS module for host name resolving using mDNS. This
         project is maintained by me but not part of avahi since it
         works even without avahi. 
avahi-dnsconfd - a small daemon which may be used to configure
         convetional DNS servers using mDNS in a DHCP like
         fashion. Especially useful on IPv6


That's it.

I think I should put something like this overview on Avahis wiki page,
I know.

Lennart


-- 
name { Lennart Poettering } loc { Hamburg - Germany }
mail { mzft (at) 0pointer (dot) de } gpg { 1A015CC4 }  
www { http://0pointer.de/lennart/ } icq# { 11060553 }
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