Investigating moving FC4 to D-Bus 0.35.2

John (J5) Palmieri johnp at redhat.com
Tue Jul 19 13:53:11 UTC 2005


Hey guys,

In the intrest of getting API's out that more reflect what we will see
in D-Bus 1.0 I am toying with the idea of upgrading FC4 to the same
version in Rawhide.  This does not effect the lowlevel D-Bus libraries
except for fixing a couple of bugs.  What this does is give a more
usable GLib and Python bindings.

What this also does is break apps using those bindings.  GLib is a
pretty big change but then again this is the first release we thought
was good enough for mass consumption.  

Python itself is changed in a number of ways but mostly when creating a
service.  Clients on the bus who just fire off blocking messages should
have no changes needed.  Clients who still need a mainloop will simply
have to import dbus.glib.

With FC5 a ways off I think it is more important to get wide use of
these API's as they will most likely be than to keep compatability with
the 0.33 bindings.  I'm not promising API's won't change but we are now
in the mode where we are trying to keep them relitivly the same.

The purpose of this mail is to find out if there are any third party
apps that use the GLib or Python bindings that are packaged for or with
FC4 and if those developers would object to this upgrade.  The real
question is would you like the pain now or later? :-) I'll put a tarball
in testing sometime this week.

I say rip the bandade, but that is just me.  The GLib bindings shouldn't
have seen much use as of yet and the Python bindings are mostly used for
clients of which requires a one or twoline change when using a mainloop.
I'm not aware of any production code that uses the Python bindings as a
server.  Plus with the new bindings the tutorials of fd.o
(http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-tutorial.html) will actually match
what is in FC-4.

Thanks,
-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>




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