Here at Red Hat the core desktop team has been working on a way to fix some of the issues with gnome-session. In doing so we have created Gnome Desktop Services which comprise of a library for turning applications such as the panel or metacity into a minimal D-Bus service, and a daemon which can activate these services and their dependancies on demand. The library is already checked into cvs in the libgnomeservice module. Ray wants to fix up a couple of issues and then commit the daemon sometime soon. We have been working hard at getting the new D-Bus and HAL changes into Fedora Core 4 Test 1 so the release of the Desktop Services stuff has been delayed a bit.

The immediate benefit derived from the Desktop Services architecture is allowing us to define services that need to be running without having to hard code them within gnome-session. It is also a segway into the whole System Services idea I have been throwing around for awhile.

Using D-Bus for this stuff is a nobrainer. D-Bus activation allows us to easily startup services through dependencies or on demand when they are needed and the ability to track the lifecycle of a service allows us to do things like profile startup time and check the running status. It is also the hope that services will create richer D-Bus interface beyond what is provided by the library so that a users desktop experience can become a lot richer through interapplication communication which is one of the goals of D-Bus in the first place.

More information and code to come.

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