From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2005-01-20T05:03:55+09:00
Subject: Re: rendezvous support

Sam Roberts wrote:
> If you asked the folks who put this together, wouldn't they would help
> you with this?

Most likely. :)

> Is it hard, or is it that its a C library and you haven't worked much
> with building C libraries? Or are you on a windows box? I follow the
> Apple rendezvous mailling list, and I get the impression they have a
> windows release of the client library, at least, maybe the server, too.

The problem is that it isn't a library.  When I last downloaded the 
Apple source, sometime in December, it built a set of applications, but 
no library that I could see.  The Ruby code, on the other hand, expected 
a library.  I wasn't sure how to get from what I had to what I needed, 
and I only had a few hours to poke around at it, so I dropped it, but 
when it came back up on the list, I pounced.  :)

> As for pure-ruby, I'm working on this.

WooHoo!!

>   - "browsing" - i.e., issuing a request and watching the net to see all
>     services as they are advertised.
> 
>   This last will be the most difficult for me... because it requires
>   listening to multicasts on port 5353, and I run OS X which already has
>   a Rendezvous implementation. The easiest way, oddly, might be to
>   implement a mDNS server in ruby, so that I can run it on a
>   non-standard port, and test my client on a non-standard port. Ouf.

That's the part I really need.  I have some computers that are all 
rendezvous-enabled, and I'm going to be writing a tool that deals with 
groups of them.  I just need to know what's out there.

>>For what it's worth, Python has a pure Python implementation of a mDNS / 
>>Rendezvous library, but it's badly broken.  Right now at work, we're 
> 
> In what way? I'd like to avoid this brokenness, is it just bugs, or is
> there something fundamental they are not doing well?

I assume it's just bugs, but I haven't spent long on it either.  The 
main problems are a complete lack of any kind of documentation, and the 
fact that the programs seem to mask SIG_INT, so if you start them you 
can only kill them from another terminal or something.  It may be that 
they work perfectly aside from the SIG_INT issue, but I couldn't figure 
out how to use them because of the lack of docs.  I don't think it's 
anything you'd have to worry about though, unless you're copying the 
Python code, line for line.

Ben