D-Bus and Bonjour service discovery

[Tim Wilkinson]

My understanding of Avahi is that this is an implementation of  
Bonjour that utilizes d-bus internally - which is not what I'm on about.

Cheers
Tim

On Nov 22, 2006, at 1:01 AM, Padraig O'Briain wrote:

> I have not read your mail very carefully but I was wondering where  
> avahi, http:/www.avahi.org, fits in.
>
> Padraig
>
> Tim Wilkinson wrote:
>> So, firstly forgive any repeats if this has been discussed  
>> recently on the mailing list - I did have  a bit of a trawl but  
>> nothing obvious popped up.
>>
>> I was looking at what d-bus offered and I was wondering what the  
>> plans are, if any, to extends the rather compelling concepts (and  
>> simplicity) to small networks.  Specifically, as a generally happy  
>> Apple user I've got very accustomed to the Bonjour service  
>> discover concepts; the ease of using my scanner on one Mac from  
>> another, easy sharing of photos or music, distributed compilation,  
>> etc etc etc.  Now, while I fully understand that Bonjour is  
>> supported in the freedesktop domain, I can't help but feel it'd be  
>> terribly useful to have a 'bonjour d-bus' - that is, the ability  
>> to use d-bus to connect to services made available on a bus  
>> spanning multiple machines on the same network.
>>
>> For example, I quite like the idea of running d-bus inside my  
>> firewalls and routers since it would enable me to create services  
>> such as port forwarding (I know, uPNP .. but I mean .. really) or  
>> networking traffic monitoring, reporting and management (be quite  
>> useful at work to have a sensible way to monitor changes in the  
>> DHCP tables for example).
>>
>> Another thought would be to run d-bus on one of those new Linux  
>> phones (the ones that are actually open so you can change stuff)  
>> so that you could utilize the phone from your laptop over d-bus  
>> rather than be constrained by a bunch of annoyingly limited  
>> bluetooth protocols (for example, I'd rather like to use my  
>> cellphone as a speaker/microphone connected to Skype on my laptop).
>>
>> I know - these are not the most compelling examples and there are  
>> other solutions - but these solutions all seems to highly specific  
>> - a bluetooth profile here, a random binary transport protocol  
>> there, etc. etc.  While d-bus might not magically make it all  
>> happen, it provides a unifying infrastructure to allow people  
>> build stuff that others can consume - and my office and my house  
>> is no longer one machine doing it all so I need that  
>> interconnectedness.
>>
>> Anyway, be interested in comments before I wander off and write this.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Tim
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>