dcop [LWN.net]

dcop

Posted Jul 6, 2007 11:39 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
In reply to: Not The Unix Way? by Richard_J_Neill
Parent article: Mandriva adds a semantic layer to the KDE 4 desktop

Funny you mention disliking dcop. That's a big part of what makes KDE
exceedingly scriptable and generally adds a lot of command-line power.
Dig into some amarok extension scripts for some examples.

arts, of course, is scheduled to go away in KDE 4; nobody likes it.

to post comments

dcop

Posted Jul 6, 2007 12:43 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (2 responses)

Adds command-line power: yes. But only when the GUI is up.

dcop

Posted Jul 6, 2007 15:16 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (1 responses)

Er, when the GUI isn't up then KDE and the remote control that dcop provides are
irrelevant.

.... As long as the applications store their data in a way that it can be retrieved without
the GUI (whether with the same program or a different one). That's the key.

dcop

Posted Jul 6, 2007 15:40 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Remote control of programs is a means to an end. What I need is to be able to do useful things with the data.

Consider an example from the beginning of the thread: images collection of digikam. Or the mail folders of kmail. Or your addressbook.

I'm not saying that the interface that dcop is not highly useful. I do say that it still doesn't help if the GUI itself isn't up.

dcop

Posted Jul 6, 2007 12:57 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

Isn't DBUS DCOP++, but without being desktop dependant?

dcop

Posted Jul 7, 2007 0:24 UTC (Sat) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link] (2 responses)

The reason I dislike dcop is that so few of the controls I want are actually implemented! That isn't always true; some applications provide everything one could want (eg amarok, klipper). For example this is a very useful shell script:

#!/bin/bash
#Pipe something to stdin of this command; it will end up on the clipboard.
dcop klipper klipper setClipboardContents "`cat`"

However, the dcop commands that I really want to have are usually missing. For example, every option in kcontrol should be dcop-enabled. That way, I could write a shell script to automate KDE configuration every time I set up a new system. (copying ~/.kde brings too much cruft with it).
Or, I'd like to be able to have the old (pre 3.4) functionality of the Show-Desktop button back.

P.S. Amarok doesn't need dcop

dcop

Posted Jul 7, 2007 19:52 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

> hat way, I could write a shell script to automate KDE configuration
> every time I set up a new system. (copying ~/.kde brings too much
> cruft with it).

Again, dcop needs the server to be up in order for it to be configured. You'd have ot run KDE first. Which is unlike what you can do with manipulation of configuration files.

(At least you can manipulate configuration files. With gnome you depend on gconf to be up even for mere configuration)

dcop

Posted Jul 8, 2007 14:53 UTC (Sun) by tmg (guest, #46149) [Link]

>That way, I could write a shell script to automate KDE configuration
>every time I set up a new system. (copying ~/.kde brings too much cruft
>with it).
You may want to try kwriteconfig / kreadconfig, which seem to even work
without KDE running. These commands probably do exactly what you want.