From kde-core-devel Sun Aug 28 11:00:37 2005 From: Stephan Kulow Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 11:00:37 +0000 To: kde-core-devel Subject: Malaga Discussions I Message-Id: <200508281300.38041.coolo () kde ! org> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=112522690717601 Hi! I wanted to blog about it, but then I figured I should just write a mail here, so everyone knows what we discussed. So far this is a User and Administrator conference in Malaga, but as the KDE e.V. meeting was before that many KDE developers are here too (just reviewed the remaining tickets and it will be fun if everyone of those arrived... ;). So we came together in the afternoon and discussed some issues that we consider interesting enough to discuss. The first one was IPC. We once again summarized the benefits of KDE switching to DBUS (among the lines of 'well maintained', 'support from toolkits and other desktops', 'distribution support already very high') and what bothers us with it ('C API', 'unsolved performance problems', 'unknown upgrade path'). So it was pretty clear, that we do should switch, but what we discussed in a pretty long and heated discussion was: how and on what level should we support applications accessing the KDE3 dcop interface. And so far we only found one use case that we consider important enough to support it: kpresenter/kdetv for KDE3 wants to disable the screensaver running within KDE4. All other dcop3<->dcop3 conversations have to be supported in a way as we do now when KDE applications started under twm. In that area KDE4 just has to make sure not to get in the way of KDE3 (e.g. different file names for communication sockets). One can argue, that we should support all our internal APIs forever, but then again this might not worth the maintaince effort (and take it as it is: untested APIs bitrot and then they are unusable just as much as if they would not exist at all). So the screensaver issue (and others you can come up with) can be fixed by a kde34bridge process registering to a running KDE3 dcopserver and registering as kdesktop and others and then forward the old calls to new calls. _BUT_ if we go there and disregard e.g. KImProxy, because it's not worth it keeping two interfaces around (and assuming the applications using it will be ported in a pretty short time anyway), then we're left with the screensaver and we could just as well a) rely on xset or b) let kdetv try dbus too - taking that by then gnome or other desktops may let their screensavers deactivate by dbus anyway. So I'd like to open this discussion to a broader audience: Do you know of any DCOP interfaces currently used, that you consider worth surviving for about forever? Greetings, Stephan -- Mein Lebensmotto? Man muss auch mal 1+1 gerade sein lassen können.