Owen Taylor wrote: > On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 19:49 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I blogged a few days ago about the idea of an "online desktop." For our >> initial prototypes, we've taken a pretty ad hoc approach that tends to >> leak Mugshot specifics in a messy and undocumented way. >> >> I brought up the idea of lots of different apps on the desktop taking >> advantage of online services and web sites, and we'd need clean APIs for >> that. >> >> I don't want to write a bunch of hypothetical APIs in a vacuum but I >> picked two that we are already using and cleaned them up / genericized >> them to illustrate the idea: >> http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Online_Desktop_API >> >> As background, the reason there are dbus APIs is that the Mugshot >> process is establishing a connection to mugshot.org via XMPP and sucking >> down a lot of information; this would be too expensive to do in every >> application. So the architecture is to have one or a few dedicated >> process(es) that go out to the Internet, and then other apps can get the >> info from these services. This also simplifies matters as we address >> offline operation and local caching, since the services can deal with it >> and not the individual apps. > > A few general concerns... (I brought these up with Havoc, but wanted to > write them down here for the broader audience.) <snip>
> - When dealing with network protocols (or even D-BUS interfaces), > it's far too easy to get sloppy and skip documentation or let > the documentation get out of sync with the code. Documenting > things in text form on a Wiki doesn't work, because it's simply > far too easy to skip the step and not update the wiki. We need > to have the same level of integration that we have with gtk-doc > for C code, where updating the documentation is an integral > part of updating the interface. Agreed, to this end, I've got a dbus-doc project going on fd.o[1], based off Jon McCann's stuff for ConsoleKit. Its still very very young, so comments and input much appreciated. I also have concerns that this seems very mudflap-oriented. It'd be nice to see some synergy going with eds-dbus. Personally I'd like to see an fd.o standard for accessing contact information. Also presence-wise we already have Galago and Telepathy, it'd be good to get a discussion going how all this fits together. Thanks, Rob Taylor [1] http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=dbus/dbus-doc.git;a=summary _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list