Clarification on upstart-0.5 and dbus usage

[Scott James Remnant]

On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 17:36 -0700, Saravanan Shanmugham (sarvi) wrote:

> And I completely support that effort. 
> 
> Its high time we stepped up a layer from plain Unix domain sockets and
> talked a higher level API. And I agree D-Bus is very likely the
> equivalent 'Unix Domain Sockets' for this purpose. But unfortunatley its
> not there yet. All this means is that D-Bus needs some more time to
> mature as a spec and as an implementation to reach that status.
> 
I am unsure on what you are basing this statement.

The D-Bus protocol has been frozen for over eighteen months, and the
reference implementation has been stable for an equivalent length of
time.

It is in daily use, a dependency of the GNOME and KDE desktop
environments, and a building block of many other freedesktop.org
specifications, protocols and services -- most notably HAL, the Hardware
Abstraction Layer.


The only other relevant communication frameworks which boast this
stability are CORBA, which is rather more heavy weight than D-Bus, and
DCOP which D-Bus was designed to replace.


You repeatedly state that D-Bus is not suitable, yet you are not stating
_why_ D-Bus is not suitable, and not suggesting any better alternative.
It is therefore very difficult for me to judge the merit of your
proposal.

> If my team were to comeup with a modular compile-time plugable interface
> between Upstart and D-Bus, would something like Glib Object system be a
> good way to do that. If I understand right, D-Bus works Glib Objects and
> Glib Object system can be made to work with other messaging mechanisms
> as well.
> 
Upstart does not use GLib.

The only real way to do it would be to develop an API and behaviour
compatible libdbus replacement for your chosen messaging system.  Since
that would have to also behave like D-Bus (including objects,
properties, introspection, etc.) it would be a lot of work.

In fact, such a layer would be roughly the same size as D-Bus, if not
larger.

So why not just use D-Bus?

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?
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