#2654 HIGH Trial-3: Sugar Shell is offering D-Bus services in the UI loop

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#2654: Sugar Shell is offering D-Bus services in the UI loop
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  Reporter:  tomeu   |       Owner:  tomeu  
      Type:  defect  |      Status:  new    
  Priority:  high    |   Milestone:  Trial-3
 Component:  sugar   |     Version:         
Resolution:          |    Keywords:         
  Verified:  0       |  
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Comment (by smcv):

 Slow network things are only OK to do in the UI loop if you do them
 asynchronously. The problem, as far as I'm aware, is that the UI part of
 the Shell does synchronous things (as in: call a method over D-Bus, block
 until the method returns, carry on with the main loop). This is a
 requirement imposed by the "friendly" API wrappers used by the UI. If done
 carefully, this is acceptable for a pure UI, but it's usually unacceptable
 for something that provides a D-Bus service - as long as the UI part's
 D-Bus call is blocking, the service's methods will also block.

 Writing nice asynchronous APIs is difficult, and whenever it's suggested
 that all access to (some D-Bus service) should be asynchronous, several
 developers pop up complaining that that would make developing apps that
 use that service too hard.

 (At some point I want to do some work on improving the API of asynchronous
 calls in dbus-python, but for the forseeable future I have my hands full
 doing collaboration.)

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2654#comment:6>
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