Re: The necessity of gdomap and gdnc?

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2005-10-25 09:37:19 +0100 Leigh Smith <address@hidden> wrote:

> In an application that indeed relies on distributed processes, this  would 
> be 
> the price to pay, but after some review of the GNUstep base  code, it seems 
> the use of distributed notifications and distributed  objects are tightly 
> linked into the pasteboard server, application  services and even deeper in 
> the AppKit/gui, regardless of whether the  application has any need for 
> such 
> functionality. 

Yes and no ... if an app is genuinely standalone, and doesn't do pasteboard, 
services, or communicate with anything else, or need to be contacted by 
anything else (to shut it down for instance) it should be easy to hack the 
gui to stop setting up to use those facilities, but that's a very 
dumbed-down application

> So my question is the degree to which gdomap and gdnc are indeed  necessary 
> for an application not requiring explicit use of inter- process comms and 
> if 
> NSMessagePortNameServer would address this  (since I see NSMessagePorts are 
> explictly excluded on the MinGW port).

Well, ideally someone would implement NSMessagePort and 
NSMessagePortNameServer for win32 ... removing the need for gdomap, thoiugh 
you would still need gdnc for workspace notifications unless you also 
modified NSWorkspace to use some other mechanism (eg writing to a file and 
polling the file for changes or some sort of peer to peer messaging for 
workspqace notifications).

> Is it, or would it be, possible to build GNUstep's gui with a ./ configure 
> option or use an NSUserDefault to limit notifications and  objects to the 
> running GNUstep application and not attempt to connect  to the gdomap & 
> gdnc 
> servers and if so, any hints on implementing this?

You would want to hack NSPasteboard to deactivate it.
You would want to hack NSWorkspace to stop it trying to communicate with a 
workspace manager or send notifications.
You would want to hack the NSApplication/Services provider stuff to stop the 
application making itsself available for things to connect to.

IMO that's the wrong thing to do though ... it's a case of throwing the baby 
out with the bathwater ... rather than disabling all the functionality until 
the problem goes away, you should be fixing the problem.  While some apps 
may not need cut and paste, drag and drop, to provide services, to interact 
with a workspace etc these are all features which make  for a good general 
experience.

I think that means ...
1. Implement the NSMessagePort stuff (perhaps windows messages could be used 
for that).
2. Either implement a distributed notification scheme that doesn't need a 
server, or work out a way to automatically start/stop gdnc so that users 
don't need to see it.