libdbus vs libgio

[David Zeuthen]

Hi,

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 10:37 AM, Michael Albinus <michael.albinus at gmx.de> wrote:
> Anything goes, and a port might be possible. But I don't know the
> availability of libgio on other systems than GNU/Linux. Is it available
> on OS X, for example? On Cygwin?

Yes, libgio-2.0 works just fine on OS X and Win32 - for example,
applications like Gimp depends on libgtk+ which in turn depends on
libgio-2.0.

As for Cygwin, I don't know, but note that for Win32, GLib (which
includes libglib, libgobject and libgio among other things) even ships
its own implementation of the message bus daemon [1]. This means that
you don't need libdbus-1 or dbus-daemon(1) for message-bus based (as
opposed to peer to-peer based) D-Bus applications to work which makes
packaging/bundling much easier. It's even easy to re-use this code on
other platforms that do not come with a session-bus on its own (BYOMB
- Bring Your Own Message Bus?)

For better or worse, the general idea is that GLib can be made to work
on pretty much anything that resembles POSIX and any compiler that
supports C90. From what I can tell (eight years involvement in the
D-Bus project), the GLib package is more portable that the dbus-1
package and it's easier to find maintainers so things work on Win32
(again, having users like Gimp etc. helps with that).

So, yes, I think it's safe for any application to port from libdbus-1
to libgio-2.0.

Hope this helps.

Disclaimer: I wrote the D-Bus implementation in libgio-2.0 so you
could consider me biased :-)

Thanks,
David

[1] : http://git.gnome.org/browse/glib/commit/?id=25581738a8d5ee7db2a6d9ebd908d59b2837cd70