I've done some thinking about DCOP recently, under the lights of the ongoing 
problems with libICE on platforms other than Linux and the fact that it's 
unmaintained.

Thinking about alternatives, there are really just two options, ORBit and 
MCOP. 

Given that MCOP is meant for multimedia and that we eventually will have to 
or want to utilize ORBit anyway in the future for all kinds of desktop 
cooperation (accessability, session management (XSMP over ORBit rather than 
ICE), network directory services, ...), I'd like to evaluate porting DCOP 
over to ORBit as underlying communication layer. 

DCOP is a nifty ipc solution based on standard X11 and libICE is definitely 
fixable.  But I really care more about semantics and ease of use than the 
binary format on the network. Replacing libICE with ORBit should be straight 
forward - almost. The only technical problem I see right now is for the 
DCOPServer to safely detect when a client goes down. I hope this is solvable, 
if not by adding something to ORBit. I haven't checked this yet.

Opinions, flames, suggestions?


Matthias