D-Bus and Bonjour service discovery

[Tim Wilkinson]

So ...

> The trick is that the D-Bus "bus" is very much about a central  
> daemon. In the setup you describe, which machine is the daemon  
> running on?
>

That's more a 'how' than a 'should' sort of thing.  I'd be happy to  
discuss how it can be achieved within the current d-bus model (from  
what little I currently comprehend) , but really I'm trying to get a  
handle on whether its a good idea at all.  Obviously the subject of  
networked d-bus has come up before, and I'm sure it will again - the  
question for me immediately is 'should it be done like this'.

> The way I understand bonjour etc. it's more like each computer  
> offers services, and other computers can find and connect to them.  
> That's different from having a bus that spans multiple computers in  
> some way.

Is it?  Or is it merely a matter of spin?  Bonjour (stupid name by  
the way) provides a bus for finding services and not a whole heck of  
a lot else - certainly doesn't provide the other niceties of d-bus.   
And of course it does that by design, leaving the actual comms bits  
to the apps themselves.

>
> You could of course offer a service via something like bonjour,  
> where the service happened to use the dbus protocol. But this would  
> not require writing any new IPC system or library, it would just be  
> a particular application (like music sharing or whatever you were  
> coding).
>

As you say, sure you could to this - but then all you're doing is  
using d-bus as a rather useful IPC mechanism and, my understanding  
is, that it's more than that.   What I want to find is a way of  
enabling d-bus on a local network, and bonjour seems like an obvious  
choice for building that bus.

> There are some other IPC systems that offer a "P2P swarm" kind of  
> deal for a distributed bus, but this is very different from what  
> dbus offers.
>

Not much into reinventing the wheel (or buying a square one with run  
flat tires that wont fit), and d-bus is obviously *the* choice for  
Linux right now.  What I'm looking to do is extend those concepts to  
a local network environment.

Which brings me back to - are their plans to do this (or similar)  
with d-bus and what are people thoughts on the subject.

Cheers
Tim