D-Bus upgrade problems in Debian

[Havoc Pennington]

Hi,

On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Thiago Macieira <thiago at kde.org> wrote:
> Here's the catch: due to the purely asynchronous nature of the thing, the
> application connected to D-Bus first and made a call to HAL, which hasn't
> yet requested its name org.freedesktop.hal. What should the application
> conclude?
>
> In this case, the solution is for the application to go back to sleep and
> re-try in a few seconds. And again and again.

Good point. This can also be somewhat addressed by the all-callbacks
all-event-driven API (basically the idea is to have a callback when
HAL appears and disappears, and a way to say "I depend on HAL," and
the API implementation tries to track HAL and notify you about it).

But, the API has to be designed and written first, and then it's
nontrivial to port all apps to use it.

One other wrench I just thought of: when the bus goes down, some
random method call in each app is likely to get an error return. And I
bet lots of apps aren't handling errors in a sane way.

Havoc