Hiding internal DBUS use inside a library

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 29.08.05 15:19, Colin Walters (walters at verbum.org) wrote:

> 
> On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 21:14 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 
> > Yes, the DBUS API is intended to be stable. It's perfectly OK to use
> > it directly from any language. In fact the avahi distribution contains
> > some utilities using the python-dbus to access avahi stuff.
> 
> Ok, cool...I'm wondering then why you need libavahi-client at all; why
> not just recommend using bindings appropriate for the application
> language like GLib, Python, Qt etc?

Three reasons: 

1) libavahi-client is much simpler to use than the bare-bone DBUS API.

2) libavahi-client resembles the API of libavahi-core (our embeddable
   mDNS stack), so it is very easy to port your applications between
   the two APIs. (Basically most functions in libavahi-client  have
   the prefix avahi_client while libavahi-core uses avahi_server. The
   set of functions is otherwise the same starting from the arguments
   and not ending in the semantics.) 

3) If people code against libavahi-client they can be sure that as
   soons as avahi offers a non-DBUS-RPC they can use that with the
   same interface. (Don't be alarmed, we won't remove the DBUS support
   in avahi anytime soon, however, for embedded applictions it might
   make sense to have an RPC-API that doesn't require DBUS.)

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering; lennart [at] poettering [dot] de
ICQ# 11060553; GPG 0x1A015CC4; http://0pointer.de/lennart/