Proposal and RFC: DAL, the Desktop Abstraction Layer

[Jamie McCracken]

Sean Middleditch wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 11:37 +0000, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> 
>><moving this to dbus/xdg lists>
>>
>>Havoc Pennington wrote:
>>
>>
>>>As Mike Hearn says, I think what you described is simply what the D-BUS
>>>session bus is for. There's no need that I see for an additional DAL. If
>>>D-BUS doesn't do this as-is we need to change D-BUS so it does. This is
>>>the whole point of D-BUS.
>>>
>>
>>So would you consider adding profile support to Dbus?
> 
> 
> That isn't necessary.  It's  just part of you specifying things.
> Instead of having each mail client implement its own MyClient.Foo
> services, write up a document specifying the official
> org.freedesktop.mailclient interface, and any compliant email apps would
> implement that.  You can then lookup instances implementing the
> interface, use service activation on it, etc.  No D-BUS code changes are
> necessary.
> 

Looking at the API, I cant see a function that retrieves a list of 
services that implement an interface.

Dont forget we are not just dealing with services that are running and 
looking at the API I also can't see an easy way of saying activate a 
service that implements the interfaces x,y and z (maybe I have missed 
something? - The impression I get is Dbus knows bugger all about 
interfaces).

As I have also stated in my other emails the interface is just a string 
and doesn't represent versioning of that interface. Wont that be a 
potential problem in the future?

jamie.