[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Re: Troubleshooting .desktop and .service file

[From: Danny Milosavljevic]

Hi,

On Thu, 23 Nov 2006 15:11:59 +0200, Eero Tamminen wrote:
[...]
> (One of the benefits of D-BUS is that other programs don't
> need to know whether your app is running, they can just
> send messages to it with D-BUS auto-invocation flag and
> D-BUS takes care that only one instance of your application
> is running.)

If you call that an "advantage"... It usually breaks one of the oldest and
best UNIX conventions: that the process blocks the caller until the task
is done.

I usually cite the gedit example:

1. gedit blahblah.c
2. export SVN_EDITOR="gedit"
3. svn ci
4. <gedit opens a tab for you to enter the commit message, while leaving
the tab "blahblah.c" open>
5. you type your commit message
6. you close just the tab with the commit message
7. svn ci STILL hangs
8. you continue editing blahblah.c, hell breaks loose

This is one of the most horrible blunders I've
ever seen (breaking an _operating system_ behaviour assumption is about as
bad as it gets).

Then again, maybe its all in my mind :)

And I do see that maybe the memory overhead of having a
wait-until-master-is-done process that blocks until 6. happens may be too
much for an _embedded_ platform. So don't take that as a condemnation, but
just a "in a perfect world" statement.

And I also see that win32 users have no problem with this behaviour,
since for them it has always been that way (leading to about zero
scriptability without resorting to hacks like EnumWindows) 

cheers,
  Danny