dbus-send error

[Tako Schotanus]

Owen Fraser-Green wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I guess this was not meant just to me so I've replied to the list in
>case I get something wrong.
>
I keep forgetting that hitting reply on messages from the dbus list 
doesn't actually send the reply to the list, sorry about that.

>
>On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 16:20, Tako Schotanus wrote:
>  
>
>>Now that I see a little more "life" on this list again I will ask again
>>a question that I posted some time ago and it's kinda related to the
>>example you give below:
>>is there any way right now to "discover" what services exist, what
>>actions they support and what arguments they take? Even better, is there
>>a way to do this like the "dcop" command in KDE?
>>    
>>
>
>The D-BUS dæmon's own service 'org.freedesktop.DBus' has a method
>ListServices detailed in the D-BUS specification but that's about it.
>
>  
>
>>If not, are there any plans to make it?
>>
>>If not, is it technically possible to even do it with the current state
>>of the code? (so I could try to make it myself)
>>    
>>
>
>I'm guessing it's technically possible to implement a ListObjects which
>could return an array of registered objects since every service must
>call dbus_connection_register_object_path with every new object. That,
>however, is about as far as you could go with introspection since a
>service doesn't register individual methods.
>
>When a client calls a method, it gets passed to the relevant object's
>message function which then, typically, looks at the method name and
>arguments and decides if it wants to serve it or not.
>
>In light of this, the "right way" to discover things at the interface
>level is at compile time for which you should probably await IDL tools.
>
Ok, that doesn't leave much of a "discovery" if you need to know 
everything at compile time. What I don't understand is that I read 
somewhere is that dbus should be able to do everything that dcop can in 
such a way that a drop-in replacement would not be technically 
impossible, but how would that be possible if such a key feature is not 
available?

To me it would be a real pity if discovery wasn't part of the dbus spec 
because it is exactly what I like so much about dcop :-)

Just so everybody knows: I don't want to turn this into a dbus vs dcop 
discussion, I know dbus has more than enough going for it and doesn't 
need to be tunred into a dcop clone. I just wondered about this 
particular dcop feature that I like, that's all :-)

Cheers,
 -Tako

>Cheers,
>Owen
>  
>