Havoc's Blog

Mark:
nobody coding it so
far that I know of, a few people expressed some interest but I
haven’t seen code. Red Hat is definitely interested.
Right now though all I have time to do is try to talk somebody
into working on it. 😉

Spent Labor Day weekend hacking on D‑BUS in
response to comments people made at Nove Hrady. Everyone
likes this
picture. I posted my photos as well.

In any case, I got object paths working as discussed on the
mailing list and also coded up but didn’t yet test
auto-exporting of set/get methods based on GObject property
introspection. At the moment, to write a D‑BUS server you simply
write a GObject, and register it with
dbus_connection_register_gobject(). Properties and signals are then
automatically available remotely. To export methods, you have to
add introspection data about them by calling
dbus_gobject_class_install_info() in your class_init(), which allows
D‑BUS to marshal existing C functions on the object. The “idl
compiler” won’t do much; it just creates a static variable
definition which is the info you pass to
dbus_gobject_class_install_info(). You are also free to type in the
variable definition by hand if you like, or to autogenerate it from
source code much like a language binding. Comments to message-bus-list.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2003–09.html#4)

Got back from Europe last night. 22-hour trip door to door; which
sucks up a whole day, but then Prague to North Carolina used to
suck up half a year not so long ago.

Czech was really beautiful, I had no idea it was so nice. Met lots
of new people hacking on the Linux desktop, which is always fun. I
collected a solid set of feedback on D‑BUS, and I
think I know what needs to be changed to have a first cut at using
it in KDE. I also understand some aspects of DCOP a bit more.
My slides from the conference: freedesktop.org and
D‑BUS.

Some interesting things I heard about:

• 
  unsermake replaces make but still uses the Makefile.am format;
  it does global dependency analysis rather than recursing
  directories. Written in Python.
• Kolab server based on the
  idea of using IMAP as the datastore for everything, rather
  than a database.
• Not new, but I was newly interested in Qt’s moc (meta-object
  compiler). In GLib terms, you could think of moc as
  a code generator that would scan your GObject implementation
  source file, and generate the class_init() function
  and other boilerplate automatically. It is not a preprocessor
  (doesn’t modify the original file, just creates a new one)
  and is not an IDL compiler (no IDL, it uses the original
  source file).

There were other interesting things too but I happened to remember
those things right this second (it’s 7am).

I also spent a lot of time on the plane reading

LDAP Directories Explained by Brian Arkills, this is a really
helpful book if you know nothing about LDAP and want to get started.
I had the following wacky idea: what if the desktop could rely
on an LDAP data store, because we had a per-user one replacing
gconfd, or always ran a machine-local one? I’m not convinced
but it’s a line of thought.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2003–08.html#28)

What a tiring day — meetings and paperwork and so forth. Leaving
for the KDE
conference tomorrow. I hope to meet lots of desktop hackers I
haven’t met, and gain firsthand knowledge of Czech beer so I can
authoritatively argue with George.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2003–08.html#21)

Frustratingly, I still can’t quite figure out how to make the size/position
constraints in metacity work properly. I wonder if I’ll end up
having to do one of those “constraint solvers” other window managers
seem to have.

Why aren’t more desktop hackers coding support for managing
desktops? Improving
gconf, integrating with Kerberos/LDAP to support user policies,
fixing up integration with file/print servers, this type of thing.
Lots of the coding here is pretty fun, at least I think so.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2003–08.html#19)

Yesterday did much hacking on D‑BUS to switch from naming messages
with a single string to naming messages with an interface name +
interface member (method, signal). Didn’t quite finish. Trying to
get things to work approximately as I think they should to help with
hacking/discussion at the KDE conference next week.

Also slowly building GNOME on my crappy laptop, which is complicated
because you have to delete the already-compiled source trees as you
go in order to get enough disk space to compile the later packages.

Today watched a bunch of “That 70s Show” saved by my PVR cable box,
and tried to buy some luggage. All stores seem to have exactly the
same pieces of luggage, with 15 different brand names.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2003–08.html#17)

Got my account on the new freedesktop.org server today,
so that is slowly getting set up. We probably won’t migrate the
existing stuff until I return from Nove Hrady, unless I
do it while there.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2003–08.html#15)

A classic web log starting point:
funny picture of the cat.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2003–08.html#14)