My last planned major patch for D-Bus, fixing up the RequestName semantics, is written and compiles. I’m still working out some memory management bugs but I am pretty happy with it. We shall see what other people think once it passes the make check and I submit it for patch review. After this it is all about merging other people’s patches and then doing a release.

Speaking of releases, I am pushing this one back a week so Robert McQueen has time to get in his boatload of changes to the Python bindings in. After that release I am giving a short period of time where features can be proposed with patches but then we will go into a feature freeze and concentrate on wringing out all the bugs. This sort of grace period is just in case there is something glaring we missed that would be important for 1.0 and could not wait until after.

WARNING - The next release will break some applications especially if you use the DBUS_NAME_PROHIBIT_REPLACE_FLAG since it is being supplemented with the DBUS_NAME_ALLOW_REPLACE_FLAG so we go the safe route and deny by default. I am not sure if I should add the prohibit flag as a deprecated flag but what is the point since we are removing all deprecated features right before 1.0.

A point of contention with me is the GLib bindings. They really need some love. I’ve been fixing bugs here and there as I find them but it would be really nice if someone who uses them extensively would step up. That is not to say they are not good, they just need someone actively polishing them. The Python bindings I am not worried about because there is an active community sending patches and bug reports. The Qt4 bindings I haven’t tried at all but I hear they are pretty good. This all reminds me if you have a D-Bus binding in a usable state please let me know so I can set up a page on the wiki to point people to the right place.

It is going to be a bit sad for me once 1.0 hits. I’ll still be doing the releases but as far as I am concerned for the most part it will be done and put into maintenance mode. We don’t want to bloat D-Bus, it is just plumbing. The interesting bits should be developed on top of it. A stable boring D-Bus is of much more value than a moving target that does everything under the sun. This is not to say development will stop. Requirements change and code rots, but D-Bus won’t be the moving target it has been in the past.

As I was saying it is going to be sad because I really enjoy hacking on it. I can count my time on it as easily being the most rewarding project I have ever worked on with some of the smartest people I have ever had a pleasure to work with contributing to it. It has also been the best organized and least controversial project I have ever worked on. I guess I can attribute most of that to Havoc’s guidance of the project. He has the uncanny ability to disperse controversy and get people focused on the important aspects.

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