Well-known services

[Owen Fraser-Green]

Hi,

I was thinking about a couple of use-cases, printing and e-mail
notification (remember xbiff?), and wondering how these are best solved.

For example, the RH CUPS spues signals in the com.redhat.PrinterSpooler
namespace or a D-BUS-enabled evolution might broadcast "You've got mail"
signals in the org.ximian.Evolution namespace. Would it not be more
sensible, however, to standardize on a set of well-known interfaces in
the org.freedesktop namespace for these common use cases.

For mail, for example, we could specify an org.freedesktop.Mail
interface with the signal org.freedesktop.Mail.NewMail then Evolution
and, best of all, any mail app could implement these signals while all
the xbiff programs just sit listening for the signals not caring about
where they come from. Thus years from now, the eggcups applet could
listen org.freedesktop.Printer.QueueChanged and never have to worry
about the fact that cups was deprecated replaced a few years before.

Also, conveniently enough, HAL has already set the trend since it is
firstly a specification and then an implementation. Thus, the first of
the new breed of well-known interfaces, org.freedesktop.Hal.Manager and
org.freedesktop.Hal.Device have already been defined.

Cheers,
Owen