Proposal and RFC: DAL, the Desktop Abstraction Layer

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 15:16 +0000, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Services are just for routing.  Objects and interfaces should be used
> > for identifying what piece of code should be run.  Try not to use
> > multiple services in an application unless you can come up with a really
> > good reason.  We also use services to track life-cycles of an
> > application so if a service goes down we can assume the application has
> > been closed.  Things get confusing if you have multiple services. 
> > 
> 
> I totally agree with you but as we cant activate a non-running service 
> by what interfaces it supports we have to blur the lines between 
> services and interfaces a bit in those instances otherwise we wouldn't 
> be able to say "activate a freedesktop compliant text editor".

You should get a list of all services that export a particular interface
and then activate the service you want.  We should fix D-Bus if it
doesn't do what we want or create another daemon that keeps track of
these things.  A spec which aims to be a standard should not try and
workaround deficiencies.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri
Associate Software Engineer
Desktop Group
Red Hat, Inc.
Blog: http://martianrock.com