[rescue] NeWS (Gnome)

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 @ 18:32 -0500, Andrew Jones said:

> > 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.

Fantastic is not a word I could use. It seemed to me that bonobo was a
big part of the bloat, bugs, and performance problems of Gnome.

Of course, you can't really point at one thing. The bigger problem is
that Gnome likes to move around and do new things, but neatly avoids
ever settling down to create a production quality release.

Gnome is an engineering teaser. It looks fairly good and *almost* works,
but is otherwise a continous BETA project.

> 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.

I would add:

5. it has some ugly configuration
6. it is unreliable
7. feels like no real design was ever done
8. it was put into Gnome because in the rare times it worked, it looked
   cool, but really is too beta even for Gnome

I didn't realize that many people had started using it for more than
just device handling. That's about all it seems to be able to handle,
and then only partially.

Then I found this:

    http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fDbusProjects

I still view dbus as mostly for device handling, because that's about
all it can manage, and it doesn't do that very well.

dbus and hal both are what I would call barely working. It just looks
to me like they were put into Gnome only because when it did manage to
work, it looked kinda cool.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["We are all of us in the gutter, some of us
looking at the stars." -- Oscar Wilde]