What's the d-bus for?

[Luke Schierer]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 10:54:27AM +0800, Wade Yin wrote:
> So the main purpose of dbus is used to communicate with different other
> programs, such as queried by other programs and interact with them right?
> For the Pidgin itself, it's not necessary? "pidgin is used to chat with my
> friends, why should I care for the interactions with different other
> software?"
> 
> Is there any example for using dbus with pidgin?

Correct, you do not *need* d-bus for anything.  You would use it if, for
example, you wanted to set a cron job to set an away message at 9am
every day.  Or you might use it to integrate with an email client's
address book (though the gevolution plugin doesn't use it).  

As Casey said, we do provide a couple relatively simple python scripts
that make use of the dbus interface to do various extra things. 

luke


> 
> On 8/14/07, Casey Harkins <caseyharkins at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Wade Yin wrote:
> > >   One of them is:   In pidgin, what's the d-bus for ...   I don't have
> > > dbus lib installed in my system, after I compiled the pidgin from
> > > source, it works normal.   is it better to running with the d-bus?
> >
> > dbus is an optional dependency for pidgin. Its primary use (for pidgin)
> > is to provide a means for other programs or scripts to interact with
> > pidgin. For example, the purple-remote program that is included with
> > pidgin allows you to send messages, change your status, etc from the
> > command line. In addition, dbus is used for networkmanager integration
> > in pidgin (where pidgin detects whether you have a network connection),
> > though this is somewhat broken right now.
> >
> > You can read more about dbus here:
> > http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus
> >
> > -casey
> >
> >
> >
> 
> *Luke Schierer **lschiere at pidgin.im* <lschiere at pidgin.im>
> D-bus is a method for external programs to query Pidgin.  If build with
> d-bus support, we have a few examples of this.
> 
> 
> luke
> 
> 
> -- 
> ---------
> Regards,
> Wade Yin