[ANN] D-Bus/Ruby 0.1.4

leon breedt bitserf at gmail.com
Wed Nov 24 03:51:21 PST 2004


Hi,

I'm happy to announce the first public release of D-Bus/Ruby.


What is it?
========

Ruby bindings for the D-BUS message bus found on more recent versions
of Linux (and possibly BSDs, in the future).


How do I get it?
============

DBus/Ruby is available from RPA (http://rubyarchive.org), the next
release will be available in RubyGem format as well.

You can also download a .tar.gz or .zip from RubyForge:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/dbus-ruby/


What does it require?
=================

It requires that you have at least version 0.22 of D-BUS installed on
your system, as well as the Glib2 bindings from Ruby/GNOME2. Earlier
versions of D-BUS may or may not work, no guarantees.

If you're on a Debian system, do:

  $ apt-get install libglib2-ruby dbus-glib-1-dev

To grab the necessary build dependencies.



What can I do with it?
=================

D-BUS may become the primary IPC mechanism for GUI desktop
applications on Linux and possibly other Unixes as well. Both GNOME
and KDE have committed to using it as a common IPC mechanism. Its not
tied to the GUI though, and doesn't have a dependency on GNOME or KDE
libraries, its only dependency is an XML parser.

Since HAL (used on recent Linux distributions such as Ubuntu or Fedora
Core 3) uses D-BUS as well, you can hook into the Global Device List
of all hardware devices on your system as enumerated by HAL, and
receive notifications on hardware addition/removal/status changes,
query device properties, etc.

The list of applications using D-BUS is likely to keep on growing.

See the examples/ directory in the source for some examples of usage.



Is there documentation?
===================

This release has only API documentation, but I believe it to be pretty complete:

http://dbus-ruby.rubyforge.org/doc/api/0.1.4/



Bugs
====

Please don't bug the FreeDesktop people with bugs in the bindings,
I'll forward any bugs in D-BUS itself on to them.

Reporting to the RubyForge bugtracker is fine:

http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?atid=1838&group_id=463&func=browse


More info on D-BUS:
================

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fdbus


Leon


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