On Friday 12 February 2010 00:56:33 Zeerak Waseem wrote: > On Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:53:10 +0100, Volker Armin Hemmann > > <volkerar...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > On Donnerstag 11 Februar 2010, Zeerak Waseem wrote: > >> Particularly when your wm can handle all the inter-app > >> communication that is necessary without dbus. > > > > the problem is the WM can NOT handle all the inter-app communication > > that is > > needed by a modern desktop environment. Especially, when you have apps > > that > > are just frames around building blocks that have to talk to each other > > (like > > for example konqueror, that is just a gui to the dolphin, khtml, konsole, > > gwenview kparts). > > But it seems to me, that the apps that need the communication are in DE's. > Which is fine, I just think that if you're choosing a smaller WM (Openbox, > awesome, JWM, etc.), where there isn't a need for an inter-app > communication that extensive, then it's a bit of an overkill really.
That's your error in logic. You are assuming that smaller WMs don't need IPC. I believe that assumption to be false. If my belief is true, then your argument falls flat. By way of example: printing. By no stretch of the imagination can printing be considered to be a niche function. How will an arbitrary app find your printers? There are multiple print server around. So, you could: 1. Say stuff it and build a print server into your app. We stopped doing that when DOS fell out of fashion. 2. Support all possible print systems. lpr anyone? 3. Or just use IPC and let dedicated print middleware deal with it. Multimedia buttons. One of the most confounding things on modern hardware are multimedia buttons. Volume is easy - make it adjust the sound server. Or you could use keybindings and have the wm do it, or you could send the keypresses to the configured audio app. And which one is that? Many apps do sound, which one will get the buttom focus? Even minimal WMs have many more such examples. Removing a sane IPC method that can be used everywhere instead of multiple implementations of similar functionality makes about as much engineering sense as claiming you don't need pipes in a shell. IPC is all about, perhaps you have not considered just how far that rabbit hole actually goes. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
