GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 311882
Bonjour support
Last modified: 2006-07-13 20:06:44 UTC
Gnome-VFS currently uses Howl for zeroconf/mdns resolution. However, KDE uses Apple's implementation (Bonjour) and some distros also prefer that one for various reasons. The license issues with the Bonjour client lib have been fixed. I've written a patch to optionally use the Bonjour API to do multicast DNS resolution. The code would live next to the Howl one, in additional preprocessor blocks (i.e. HAVE_HOWL, HAVE_BONJOUR or neither) in the dns-sd interface and module. It adds the following options to configure.in: --enable-bonjour --with-bonjour-includes --with-bonjour-libs Howl remains the default, and if both are present on the system, you have to specify --disable-howl and --enable-bonjour to use the Bonjour implementation. I've tested it with Nautilus and the dns-sd test, and it works.
Created attachment 49893 [details] [review] Patch against HEAD, adds Bonjour support
Thanks for your efforts! Unfortunately, we're already in feature freeze for GNOME 2.12, which means that the Bonjour integration has no chance of being integrated for this release. It is a very interesting candidate for being integrated into GNOME 2.14, though, which is scheduled in March 2006.
It's a different implementation of an existing feature - is that also covered by the feature freeze?
If Bonjour licence is 'good' (ie lgpl compatible), I'd tend to get rid of the howl code (which distros don't want to use because of licencing concerns) and replace it with the bonjour code.
Well, it's supposed to be BSD-licensed, but I don't know if that's with or without the advertising clause (which would make it GPL-incompatible). The license itself is not included in the latest source release, but the relevant source files have this: rdar://problem/3824265: Replace APSL in client lib with BSD license. However, all else being equal, Bonjour probably gets more QA and testing than Howl does, and may be a more secure choice.
From a quick look the code looks good (I will have to take a closer look a bit later). But I totally agree with teuf, and would be all for it. I have not clue about the license stuff. I am also not 100% sure about feature freeze, as this introduces a whole lot of code at a very late time in the release cycle. I would suggest I write a mail to release team and see if we can still get it into 2.12 but it might also be "no". Comments?
Sounds good. If you could get it in 2.12, that would be sweet.
Also, since the 2.12 release will use Howl anyway, the code wouldn't actually change anything - the Howl-based code hasn't changed at all.
Is this still valid? Aren't we using Avahi now?
I think we are using avahi now so this is obsolete I guess. I am closing this as WONTFIX therefore.