[Portland] The Code

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 07:52:19AM -0800, Bastian, Waldo wrote:
> An important thing to keep in mind here is to come up with solutions
> that work with Linux distributions as they are deployed today. There
> will be cases were that will not be possible, but it should be taken
> into account.
> 
> It may be feasible to have different short term and long term solutions,
> although I'm not sure how that would work out. But it would be
> interesting to start with a simple IPC mechanism as used by Lubos and
> target a Dbus based solution down the road. 

Well, at the application level it looks like it could be an optional
thing.  I.e., an app like Inkscape could simply try to init the dapi
service, and if it can't, then it assumes that functionality is not
available and goes on.

Probably the most important thing is to stablize the wire protocol,
and/or keep it extremely backwards compatible.  Once app developers
start using it, there are going to be packages of those apps floating
around for a long time using a fixed version of the protocol.  The
stability of the API may be its #1 killer feature.  If we can ensure it
works consistently 100% of the time that the service is present, that
will make it well worth adopting, especially in the face of all the
variation in distros, desktop environments, packaging formats, and so
on.

Bryce