Discovering services

[Havoc Pennington]

Tako Schotanus wrote:
>>> Exactly, when nobody is using them, but how can a service know when it's
>>> not going to be used anymore? Maybe a generic interface, with ref/unref
>>> methods that services could implement would be a solution.
>>
>> Some reasonable approaches are:
>>  - time out and exit after being unused for a while
>>  - require clients to register/unregister (and track if any
>>    clients disconnect without unregistering, to avoid leaks)
>>
>> Distributed reference counting has lots of problems so we've tried to 
>> avoid that. Eventually we might want some kind of generic 
>> register/unregister mechanism, but it's not clear to me what that 
>> would be like, so right now everyone is rolling their own suitable for 
>> their needs.
>>
> Ok but this still won't work very well for those examples you gave 
> before where a service might actually open a window or start a user 
> visible application or something, won't it?
> 
> Wouldn't that imply that activation should not be done automatically 
> when only asking for introspection?

I would not recommend activating stuff just to introspect it, no.

Havoc