D-Bus and Bonjour service discovery

[Havoc Pennington]

Hi,

Tim Wilkinson wrote:
> Instead what I was proposing was the addition of a third default bus - 
> call it the 'lan bus' or 'bonjour bus' if you want.  Its purpose in life 
> is to allow clients to make services available between machines rather 
> than just within one machine (using the other buses).

It's not clear to me what "lan bus" means, though. You can't just have a 
bus "on the lan" it has to run on some machine. Jamie suggested one 
thing it might mean, a bus on each machine with something like bonjour 
for discovering available machines. That might be of interest to 
experiment with.

> It seems sort of silly when you look at a networked home and see just 
> how much Linux is kicking about in it (various network boxes, Tivos, 
> Cellphones,  NAS, media servers, etc.) and then realize that there's no 
> standard way to plug these pieces together.  Sure, there are lots of 
> other ways to do it, but that makes talking to an audio device on your 
> local box different from talking to one on a set of speakers on a remote 
> device.  At least in a LAN scenario, and with a sprinkling of dbus 
> magic, I don't see why it has to be that way.

There are very good reasons why different kinds of IPC exist. Audio is a 
great example - network audio (different from streaming audio) is very 
hard, and from what I've heard about it, barely feasible with a 
highly-tuned domain-specific protocol. It's probably not possible to 
make it work with dbus as the protocol.

Havoc