DBus for Generic Data Access Methods?

[Michael 'Mickey' Lauer]

Jim McDonald wrote:
>     So what's special about the above example?  It's modular: the
> person who owns/writes the main contacts manager app doesn't know or
> care about talking to directory services and focuses on generating
> the best app they can.  Separately, someone else writes the app that
> just queries directory services for information given a key (email
> address, for example).  And although these two apps don't
> necessarily even know about each other, or the navigation app, they all play happily together.

The OpenMoko team agrees 100%. We see this as an important part of a free mobile phone platform. Like Marcel already confirmed, we're going the eds-dbus way for PIM data access.

I want to have dbus access for everything (that makes sense) as well, i.e. 

* gps position [already there in the stock gpsd]
* bluetooth [already there and even more in next revision]
* signal strength of everything RF
* peripheral status
...

>  
>     Anyway, I guess that my point is if there is some attempt to
> make this work then the key things that needs to be sorted out is a
> set of well-known object paths, methods and signals so that this
> type of thing would work.  Are there any moves afoot to look at setting up such information?

Right now (of course) our priority is to get the 1973 out of the door to get you something to work with, so we're doing things slightly hackish and hardcoded ;)

Once the device is out, we would be glad to discuss with all of you how to do the dbus interfaces in a sane and portable way -- of course we can launch the discussion now, let's do it, that's what the devel list is all about.

Two RFC's we should consider as a starting point are: 

* http://www.linuxtogo.org/gowiki/MicroHal

* http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/gnome-power-manager/trunk/docs/dbus-interface.html

Regards,

:M:
-- 
Michael 'Mickey' Lauer | IT-Freelancer | http://www.vanille-media.de