[rfc] Activating Common Services

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 11:04 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Richard Hughes wrote:
> > So, is HAL wrong to register itself on the bus before adding all the
> > coldplug devices (other services like NM do similar things to this too),
> > or should we have some sort of "activation" interface that is always
> > present as soon as the service appears on the bus and also lets us shut
> > a service down:
> > 
> > org.freedesktop.Hal.Activation.Start
> > org.freedesktop.Hal.Activation.Stop
> 
> Remember not to use 'activation' in APIs ;-)

:-)

> There is a StartServiceByName call already, and many can be stopped by 
> just taking their bus name (use REPLACE_EXISTING flag).

Sure, I've added this to the documentation.

> In general life cycle policies are service-dependent since the best 
> policy will vary.

Sure, agree.

> This is very key not to ignore ;-) in fact it's so critical that you are 
> better off just not messing with refcounts. Distributed refcounting is 
> both slow and unreliable.

Agree.

> I would suggest alloc/free on particular objects in the service API 
> rather than on the entire service, since a service API can in principle 
> grow arbitrarily complex. The "one bus name, one interface, one object" 
> pattern that leads people to ask why they are typing the same thing 
> three times is not the only possible pattern.

Okay, the StartServiceByName solves my immediate problem.

Thanks,

Richard.