[rfc] The Big Picture

[David Zeuthen]

Hey,

I agree that The Big Picture(tm) isn't really spelled out anywhere. It
also depends on who you ask. Personally I think I've got a pretty good
Big Picture(tm) that involves code that is in-progress 

 D-Bus
 HAL
 ConsoleKit
 PolicyKit

as well as changes to some exiting software

 X.org
 CUPS
 ...

We're getting somewhat closer every day. I've been meaning to blog about
this, will probably do soon as I need to start writing my LCA 2007 talk
"Gluing a desktop and a kernel together" which will focus exactly on big
picture stuff like you are asking about. 

(And we badly need this so the various open source communities and the
distribution vendors can work more closely together and align on the
same goals.)

> That would result in an activation request of
> o.fd.Hal back to upstart,

Pretty soon D-Bus will be able to activate services on the system
message bus, see the patches that I've sent earlier. For the record,
hardware specific user space stuff such as hplip, gpsd etc. can and
should be spawned and life-cycle managed by hald, we've had that
infrastructure for ages, no-one just did this.

As I've tried to troll about on this list, the upstart list and my blog
(see the entry http://blog.fubar.dk/?p=76 and the link to the upstart
list) is that I'm not really sure where Upstart fits on the desktop in
apart from masking problems we want to solve correctly. (I hope Scott
don't hate me too much now.)

Either way, I guess this is sorta off topic on the D-Bus mailing list.

    David