It seems over time I have become the defacto maintainer of D-Bus. Not because I’m particularly smart or wanted the task but because other maintainers saw their time pulled away from the project. As the story goes I needed a release of the 0.3x series and Joe, who was maintaining the 0.2x releases at the time was busy so I ended up doing the first upstream release of 0.30 and ever since have found myself in the position of pushing the project towards 1.0.

As it is we get closer every day. With the last major ABI changing TODO release being reviewed things are looking pretty good. After this round of patches gets in we will most likely skip 0.51 and move directly to 0.90. As I have said in the past it is in our best interests to get D-Bus API/ABI stable and to be able to support the library as quick as possible.

This also means I have no qualms about being the bad guy and saying a big resounding NO to any code, no matter how simple it is, that does not help us get to 1.0. The only way a feature will get in is if it is absolutely necessary. Nine out of ten times a feature can be implemented above the bus and doesn’t need to be part of the codebase. If it does it can get in after 1.0 but I challenge people to look at other avenues before coming to that conclusion. Did you know that you can talk to applications directly without getting the bus involved?

I don’t like to say no to people. They are usually passionate about what they believe to be a needed feature but at this point in the game I can’t come down and explain every bit of reasoning for not allowing it. The question that needs to be asked is will this get us to 1.0? Answer that and you have your answer to if it will be accepted or not.

This doesn’t quite apply to bindings as they still need some work and will have a tiny bit more leeway if they want to be considered for the 1.0 launch. For instance if there is a feature in the bus that is not mapped yet it should be able to be added.

Havoc had some notes on what really needs to be looked at:

Something we should consider for 1.0 also is getting the basic dbus tutorial written out, and cleaning up the doxygen warnings about any missing or broken reference docs, maybe glancing over all the doxygen output for silliness. The most important docs task is probably just a “hello world” example using each of the working bindings showing the right way to talk to other apps in a desktop session.

Should also look over:
http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/api/html/todo.html
(well, that says it was generated Aug 2, so a newer version)

Again, I thank everyone who is helping out or has helped out in the past. I don’t mean to be harsh but too many people are depending on a stable D-Bus release for us to lose focus of that goal.

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