KDE adoption of D-Bus

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Wed, 2006-02-15 at 16:31 +0100, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I'm posting this as a KDE developer.
> 
> In order to adopt D-Bus as a replacement for DCOP in KDE4, there are a 
> couple of things we'll need, aside from the Qt4 bindings that I'm taking 
> care of. So I'm wondering how far along these things are:
> 
> 1) Windows and MacOS X support
> KDE4 (or at least KDE 4 applications) is supposed to run on both of those 
> platforms. Has libdbus been ported to those platforms? Does it work? Are 
> there known problems?

There was someone doing a port to OS X.  He ran into problems
propagating the session service address and also running as part of a
bundle.  How does DCOP get around this?  

> 2) starting the session bus daemon on demand
> KDE 3 applications will currently start the DCOP server daemon if none is 
> running. This is necessary to provide the IPC that KDE 3 applications 
> require.
> 
> If we switch to D-Bus to accomplish those same tasks, KDE 4 applications 
> will need the D-Bus session server daemon to be started even if run in an 
> environment without it. To illustrate, imagine a user running Konqueror 
> inside his preferred window manager out of 1996 -- or on Windows.
> 
> In other words, is it possible to use D-Bus session if the daemon isn't 
> running and DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS isn't set?

There is no solution for doing this right now.  How do application find
out what DCOP instance to talk to?

> I can provide the code myself in the Qt bindings or whichever KDE wrapper 
> we write, but I would rather see a common solution. Especially 
> considering this will very likely be the case for Windows and MacOS X.

It would be good to solve this issue in D-Bus itself, I agree.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>