Tracking whether a connection is alive

[Kay Sievers]

I'm just replying to my own post on the DBUS list, to move the topic
over to this list, cause it doesn't require any dbus changes.

short summary:
  There is the idea to add some functionality to HAL to get a exclusive 
  lock on a device, to make sure, that no other application will perform
  any action on it, while it is in use (cd burning).
  David asked on the dbus-list how HAL can be notified of a dead
  application, holding a lock and some sort of "alive? ping" was discussed,
  but later rejected.

  http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/dbus/2004-July/001299.html


I want to discuss another approach here:

HAL keeps track of the locks and it's mandatory for the lock owner to
respond with the "reason" of holding the lock, when asked for.
The "reason" returned can be easily interpreted by the _user_ and the
user can take the appropriate action to solve the conflict.
(think of a CD burning application, that displays a list of all you cd-
drives with a live list of current activity going on from other
applications)

If the lock is released, the application is notified by dbus and can
display the now idle device and let the user start the new job on it.
It should also be possible to specify:
"start burning CD after <locking app> has finished <reason>"

It would be really nice feature. (think of a device manager, that
displays the current activity for all active devices)

What do you think?

Kay


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