naive question ...

[Tako Schotanus]

Sean Middleditch wrote:

>On Tue, 2004-04-27 at 10:41, Tako Schotanus wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Well HAL  (http://freedesktop.org/Software/hal for those people who
>>like me were maybe wondering where it could be found) seems to be only
>>for 2.6 kernels so that's no option.
>>    
>>
>
>Currenly only for 2.6 kernels; it's intended to work anywhere that
>OS-specific bits are written.  So that HAL-using apps can run on BSD,
>Solaris, whatever.  Just needs porting.  But that's rather off topic
>here, I guess.  ;-)
>
>  
>
>>Besides the fact that I think that small example that show off how
>>dbus works should be found _here_ instead of having to look around
>>(and look _hard_!)  to find them.
>>
>>It seems to be pretty hard to to just say: want to use dbus? Well just
>>take a look at <this code> to get an idea or: just insert <this code>
>>into your application as a simple starting point.
>>    
>>
>
>There are examples in the D-BUS tarball, IIRC.
>  
>
Ok, but usefull enough to take a look at even without needing a 2.6 
kernel? I'll take a look at it.

>  
>
>>Please don't take this as criticism, I wouldn't mind writing a couple
>>of simple examples myself if I would only understand how everything
>>works. It's just that, while I know dbus isn't used yet by a large
>>group of people, there _must_ be somebody out there that has written
>>code that he thinks could help other people understand more how things
>>work!
>>    
>>
>
>The documentation could use some work...  If you want to write a
>tutorial, that would be great.  :)  Just remember that until 1.0 is
>released, nothing says the API won't change.  This is probably one
>reason that nobody has put a lot of time into a tutorial yet...
>  
>
Well, a tutorial might be a bit too much for a pre-1.0 version, but even 
so, many OSS project never reach a 1.0 so I can't know how long to wait 
for decent documentation ;-)

But for myself I was thinking more of either some extensively documented 
examples or maybe a HOWTO or something like that (writing non-code 
documentation never has been my strong point ;-)), just something to 
help people on their way. There must have been lots like me who just 
downloaded the tarball to see if it could be used somewhere or how it 
works. And then give up because, okay, it compiles, it installs, it 
tests okay..... but now what?

Even a tiny document saying saying "imagine you have a service which you 
want to control with DBus, it has a start(), a stop() an isStarted() and 
OnStart()/onStop() methods/signals. Now this is what you would do: 
......" would help enormously to get people over that first obstacle. 
Once people see it and think "wow this really works!" they might be more 
willing to spend some time to really get to know it all.

>  
>
>>Cheers,
>> -Tako
>>    
>>

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