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 love Linux, and I would love to see Linux grow and improve. I also use (and am comfortable with) Windows and Android (which I would consider Not Really Linux) and other platforms*. Attitudes and actions which push Linux as the One Ring smack of 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish'. That latter point, really, bothers me greatly. Market disruption happens, and sometimes it's even necessary for advancement, sure. Other than those two things, D-Bus seems interesting and useful. If it manages to obsolete system-local IPC mechanisms, that's great. If it manages to get out into the local network and be used to pass messages back and forth between my local systems? That's awesome. If it manages to allow applications to talk back and forth in a secure fashion between Linux and non-Linux systems? Now we're talking about some real improvement on the status quo. * I think I could get by on a Mac, but it's difficult getting past some prejudices and annoying fanboys I know IRL. It's also difficult getting past the price tag; I don't see myself buying the hardware or software unless I intend to develop for them. As for what I use? All five computers at home run Linux; one Debian, three Ubuntu, one Gentoo. My fiancee and I both have Android phones. -- :wq
