Being interested in NameOwnerChanged for a namespace, not one name

[Marcel Holtmann]

Hi Lennart,

> > > Mission Control, a Telepathy component, watches for new Telepathy 
> > > Connection Managers appearing by binding to NameOwnerChanged and looking 
> > > for names starting with "org.freedesktop.Telepathy.ConnectionManager.".
> > > 
> > > So obviously this is a bad idea. ryan lortie rightly called me out for 
> > > this at GuadeKademy last summer, and I started implementing support for 
> > > argXprefix in match rules: 
> > > <http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/wjt/dbus.git;a=commitdiff;h=refs/heads/argx-prefix-matching>. 
> > > I haven't worked on it since then, but have just been reminded of it.
> > > 
> > > Any opinions on whether:
> > > 
> > > • this is a good general approach to solving this problem;
> > > • this is a good specific approach to solving this problem;
> > > • support for this should be negotiated at connection time, or inferred 
> > > by the error reply from AddMatch, or included in a list of features 
> > > pushed to the client by the bus just after connection (as suggested by 
> > > Alban on IRC), or...?
> > 
> > what is wrong with just adding glob style pattern matching to the arg0
> > argument? Or to AddMatch arguments in general. It seems a bit more
> > straight forward to me. Just doing prefix matching also seems a bit
> > short sighted to me. What is if some application requires suffix
> > matching or wants some specific middle part?
> 
> I had a similar thought when I read Will's mail first. However, I then
> came to the conclusion that prefix matching is what we want here,
> because it's the one scheme that makes sense with the way dbus names are
> build. 
> 
> Or to put it in other words: i believe allowing more flexible matching
> here might get people to name their services "foo.$something.bar"
> instead of "foo.bar.$something", which I believe we should avoid and
> hence not encourage by more flexible name matching.

I think we should discourage this waiting for a bus name with a specific
prefix at all. Using active registration with the server is what should
be done. I think Telepathy needs to be fixed here and not D-Bus.

Regards

Marcel