we need a spec for handling mediums

Havoc Pennington hp at redhat.com
Mon Aug 16 17:14:58 EEST 2004


On Sun, 2004-08-15 at 12:41, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> "Implement the API primarily as a D-BUS interface. The client library
> should be a thin convenience layer over the D-BUS interface."
> 
> This is fine for desktop infrastructure (like ROX-Session, gnome-session,
> etc), but what about applications? Programs like Gimp, ROX-Filer, etc,
> can't assume there is a D-BUS daemon running to handle their
> configuration.
> 
> (This isn't a problem for RedHat, of course, since you'll start a D-BUS
> session on login for all desktops, but upstream authors can't assume
> everyone will be using RedHat.)

s/RedHat/Red Hat/g, please ;-)

Anyhow, I don't think it's "Red Hat" - the point is "all sufficiently
new distribution versions" - basically the idea is to add it as an
expectation for UNIX desktops that the dbus daemon is running.

It's a trivial one-line addition to .Xclients (or whatever someone is
using) to run the daemon on an old distribution, documented in the dbus
man page.

Realistically nobody is going to install a newer GTK+ or whatever than
the one that comes with their distribution, either. At some point we
have to make progress, and that means to run newer app versions you run
a newer distribution version - or do some extra work.

If there were a way to do this without a daemon I'd do it, but I don't
think there is. The change notification is absolutely essential for
GNOME to work and has allowed a ton of nice UI enhancements.

Havoc





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