[rescue] NeWS (Gnome)

[Andrew Jones]

> Um... dbus and hal cover a far different thing than Gnome's internal
> IPC (called bonobo I believe).

Bonobo is being dropped entirely. It was a document system based on
CORBA. Bonobo was fantastic, but had absolutely no documentation.  I
don't mean that the documentation sucked: It simply did not exist.

DBus has four problems: 
1. It's as slow as CORBA.  
2. It has none of the language abstraction, network abstraction, or
standardization of CORBA.  Language bindings might as well not exist for
anything but C and Python.
3. It has a horrendously unstable client library.  
4. It's almost totally undocumented, just like Bonobo.

Because they refuse to freeze the API, no one can actually use it.  You
see, for some reason related to its use of a magically named pipe, you
can't use two client libraries independently.  Only one copy, one
version of DBus can be used for desktop apps by any one user.  I'm
unclear on whether it's even possible to install two libraries side by
side in the same $PREFIX. (Good luck finding any two gnome applications
that use the same version of the DBus client library and are able to
interoperate in any useful way... even for the extremely simple tasks
that DBus can actually handle, applications often communicate via
Bonobo, despite its planned obsolescence. Total overkill, but DBus is
too broken to use...)


> Why also duplicate the bugs though?
>
> Evolution is huge, buggy, slow, and has some of the same UI and other 
> bugs that Outlook has.
>
> Sure, copy the functionality, but let's avoid the problems...

Evolution is buggy for the same reasons Outlook is buggy.  It was, for
the most part, designed and constructed before the desktop environment
or the support libraries existed.  Evolution's needs led to the
development of the support libraries.

Evolution and Nautilus predate Gnome 2.