Looking for well-known service names

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 08 Mar 2008 at 10:01:27 -0800, Jim Carter wrote:
> I have just written the "Meow Media Player" using GStreamer as the 
> backend, taking about 2 hours to create a first draft as a shell 
> script and about 15 hours to learn to build a Python GUI with Glade.  
> Now I want to Do the Right Thing and make it available to 
> media-relevant applications over the D-Bus.  

The D-Bus core developers don't know what your requirements, and those
of the other media players, are (and to be honest, it's not our place to
impose "standard" APIs on unrelated projects). I'd suggest talking to the
developers of other media players - you, and they, know the problem domain
better than we do.

Some general API design advice, though:

* D-Bus best practices (by Havoc): http://log.ometer.com/2007-05.html

* avoid unnecessary round-trips

* a hook for extensibility/simple capability discovery (like Telepathy's
  Channel.GetInterfaces() method, Connection.GetInterfaces() method,
  Account.Interfaces property, and AccountManager.Interfaces property) is
  well worth having

* actually document your API, rather than just writing down a bunch of
  method signatures - the desktop notification spec (from the Galago
  people, as implemented by libnotify and notification-daemon), and the
  Telepathy spec <http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/spec.html>, are good
  examples (disclaimer: my job is to work on Telepathy, so I'm biased)

Regards,
    Simon