Status Update (was: Re: [announce] dbus4win)

[Marc Mutz]

Hi,

Let me give you a status update on our work:

On Tuesday April 21 2009, Marc Mutz wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to announce that we at KDAB are working on 'dbus4win', which we
> like to think of as a re-unification of the freedesktop.org GIT tree and
> the windbus.sf.net SVN tree. To this end, we already spent some time to
> graft the SVN tree onto the git tree (windbus-svn branch).
>
> There are three areas we are currently focusing on:
> 1. cleaning up the SVN history (dbus4win branch)
>    This is an attempt to rebase the remaining diff between the SVN tree and
>    dbus-1.2 onto dbus-1.2, preserving the windbus history where possible.

This has been completed meanwhile.

In addition, we've integrated contributions of Tor Lillquist and  
Ole André Vadla Ravnås.

As a result, internal testing indicates that the current dbus4win fixes quite 
some issues the Kontact on Windows windbus code still showed. Till can give 
details on what exactly we found has improved.

> 2. Make dbus cross-compile with mingw (xcompile branch)
>    This is needed for the gpg4win (www.gpg4win.org), and Kontact-on-Windows
>    projects, as well as for all the reasons mentioned in
>    http://lwn.net/Articles/307732/

This is in an intermediate stage. At one point, cross-compilation worked, but 
it has since deteriorated again. We intend to fix this up again, but two of 
our engineers working on the projects are now going on vacation (me 
included), so it won't happen before the second half of June. The current 
state can be found in the dbus4win-xcompile2 branch.

> 3. Implement the unix transport for Windows using the design already chosen
>    for libassuan. This consists of writing plain text files with a nonce
> and the tcp port number of the server into the filesystem location where on
> Unix the Unix Domain Socket special file would go. Current windbus is not
> really usable for multiuser systems, though there was a patch recently
> trying to address that, but falling short of the full solution. There are
> certainly other ways to implement a per-user transport on Windows, but this
> design has proven itself in libassuan, an extremely security-conscious
> library (IPC lib for gnupg components).

Here, we're still working on both code and spec. For interested parties, the 
work is ongoing in branch dbus4win-noncetcp (that's nonce-tcp, not 
non-ce-tcp, we're doing tcp since that one _does_ work on WinCE :)

Thanks, and see you at the other side of vacation,
Marc

-- 
Marc Mutz <marc at kdab.com> | Senior Software Engineer
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH & Co.KG, a KDAB Group Company
www.kdab.com || Germany +49-30-521325470 || Sweden (HQ) +46-563-540090
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