DeviceKit-power release next Monday

[David Zeuthen]

Hey,

On Tue, 2009-10-06 at 00:50 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Now that DK-disks and DK-power are more and more widely used, such API
> changes become and issue.
> How will that be handled in the future? When can we expect a stable (D-Bus) API?

For DKD, don't expect a stable API anytime soon. FWIW, I even doubt that
it's useful to make the API stable. It's kinda-sorta an API that is
useful only for the OS vendor to implement a desktop environment or an
OS installer or similar. So it's not really worth the effort or cost
(and the cost is huge) to have a stable API.

Applications (that are not disk utility, partitioning etc. apps) should
just be using the GIO API since it's simpler and do what they need
(discover/watch mounts). Or, of course, similar APIs if you use other
toolkits than the G stack. And, FWIW, the implementation of GIO, GVfs,
uses, and tracks, DKD. Disk Utility apps, such as Palimpsest, are
normally only provided by the OS vendor and tracking an unstable API is
not a problem.

I think the same goes for DeviceKit-power: For the few bits where apps
need to care about power management (if any?), GLib and/or Gtk+ really
should provide abstract interfaces whose concrete implementation uses
DeviceKit-power on Linux and other free platforms. GLib and/or Gtk+
would also provide implementations on Win32/OS X/whatever that uses the
appropriate OS specific stuff.

     David