sight [LWN.net]

sight

Posted Dec 31, 2005 11:12 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
In reply to: sight by DiegoCG
Parent article: Command-line AbiWord

DCOP communicates with a running instance. So you have to have an X server running and authorize your scripts to connect to it.

abiword can be run as a pure command-line program, the good old unix way.

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sight

Posted Dec 31, 2005 13:07 UTC (Sat) by danielthaler (subscriber, #24764) [Link]

Unfortuantely servermode is performed by the main abiword binary. It would be nice to have a utility that did the same without needing X libraries, gnome libraries, etc.
I have an X-less webserver I might have tried this on, otherwise.

sight

Posted Jan 1, 2006 16:30 UTC (Sun) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

What is the problem of needing the libraries as long as it doesn't need X
server when running?

(I'm not sure whether AbiWord requires X server also though.)

sight

Posted Jan 4, 2006 21:40 UTC (Wed) by DiegoCG (guest, #9198) [Link]

DCOP/dbus can work without X - several non-graphic KDE programs use it. The fact that kwork needs X still doesn't beats my point: Why abiword just doesn't use dcop/dbus? Seems like a lot of wheel reinventing to me :/

sight

Posted Jan 5, 2006 4:23 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

A "lot" of wheel reinventing didn't likely happen. There's a big difference between a small simple protocol used by one application and what D-BUS or DCOP do. This Abiword tool needed only a teeny tiny fraction of what D-BUS is made to handle.

I wouldn't be surprised if the code to use this custom protocol is smaller than the code it would take to hook up to D-BUS. I've written a number of simple message protocols like this and they generally take only a few dozen lines of code at most.

This also means that Abiword doesn't have a direct D-BUS dependency, and keeping dependencies down seems to be something Abiword developers like to do.