A common VFS and a Common conf-system [Part II]

[Waldo Bastian]

On Thursday 03 March 2005 01:44, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 00:09 +0000, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> >Waldo Bastian wrote:
> >> I think there is some misunderstanding here about the separation between
> >> daemon and the backends. The question isn't so much about the daemon
> >> itself, as well as how the backends run. Do the backends run in a
> >> process of themselve, as separate thread in the daemon process or do
> >> they time-share the main single thread of the daemon?
> >
> >Well considering some of the backends would probably be synchronous in
> >nature (EG anything taht involves a lot of polling) then they would have
> >to be threaded with the deamon being async in that case - is that right?
>
> I can't think of any situation where you have a network protocol that
> must be synchronous.

Theory says that you can break down all protocols into some event-driven state 
machine, practice says that it's all going to be much easier if you can take 
a procedural approach. libsmbclient is a good example in this regard. I think 
it's typical for backends to rely on some third party library for doing all 
the hairy stuff, and that leaves you at the mercy of the whims of such 
library. 

I think the relative successful proliferation of KIO backends (kio-slaves) is 
due to the fact that it's simple to write one, I think it's important to 
preserve that benefit in a new system.

But I guess it doesn't need to be one size fits all, as long as the 
daemon-backend interface gives the backend the freedom to chose the approach 
that's best for that backend, I think all is well. I just think that it's 
important to keep that in mind when setting up the overall design

The third party library situation is also the reason that has me in favor of 
running backends in their own process btw. It's always a bit of a gamble 
whether libFoo and libBar will get along with each other, especially if it is 
by the time the end-user happens to use the two backends together before 
anyone is going to find out.

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian at kde.org   |   Free Novell Linux Desktop 9 Evaluation Download
bastian at suse.com  |   http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/eval.html
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