On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 7:31 PM, Michael Mol <mike...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 7:00 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> On Sat, 17 Sep 2011 15:24:39 -0400 >> Michael Mol <mike...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Dbus is an interesting piece of technology and rather useful, it does >> it a disservice to knock it. > > Honestly, I really only want to provide reasonable criticism. I just > tend to get hung up on the nitty gritty details and where I think I > see something illogical. > >> As Canek posted a few mails higher up, it >> implements a standard messaging layer on top of existing mechanisms. >> You know about the existing mechanisms so you also know that they only >> provide a means for communication, not the language used for the >> communication. And developing a language for every IPC you want to do >> becomes tiresome very quickly. > > Don't I know it. I have to maintain proprietary, network binary > protocols passing data between propriety applications I also maintain. > I don't _like_ that architecture in the slightest, but it's what I get > paid for. > >> >> As an analogy (albeit a poor one) dbus relates to IPC as TCP relates to >> IP - all the boring plumbing underneath your communication that makes it >> work at all is already there. It would work best if dbus doesn't become >> yet another way to do IPC, but replaces many of them. Imagine how >> much unbloat you could accomplish if you could remove all the little >> bits of IPC plumbing scattered throughout the average Unix system's >> codebase. > > There's the terminology confusion that I got hung up on in the last > email; D-Bus is a higher-level IPC mechanism than the ones it's > implemented on top of. > >> There are many code projects out there that deserves to be maligned to >> the point of painful death, then killed. But I honestly beleive dbus is >> not one of them. > > There are two principle things I dislike about D-Bus. > > 1) It doesn't support live upgrading of the daemon. We discussed the > reasons behind this several weeks ago, as I recall. Transparent > session control handoff is, of course, complicated, and nobody has > seen the work as worthwhile. > > 2) It comes with (or appears to come with) a Linux-centric (sometimes > even a Linux-only) view.
I think you got it wrong. dbus runs in every single Unix, I believe: it certainly runs on *BSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X. On top of that, dbus works (albeit with some differences) on Windows. As I said, dbus works on top of Unix sockets, and that works in every OS in the planet, I believe. It is one of the pieces of code most portable ever. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
