more desperate cries for help...

[Greg Turner]

On Monday 28 October 2002 09:51 pm, Greg Turner wrote:
> Back to Ove:
> > The endpoint mapper is a service that's accessed through RPC, it
> > shouldn't be a client-side feature in shared memory. In Windows,
> > the local endpoint mapper is hosted by rpcss.exe. (In Wine, it
> > could be implemented by launching a Wine-rpcss whenever we need an
> > endpoint-mapping service to hold an endpoint registration, and make
> > it stay alive for (only) as long as the endpoint registrations it
> > holds are still alive.)
>
> Smart!  Now that you mention it, I remember reading in the DCE spec
> that this is, indeed, how it's supposed to be (not the rpcss part,
> but the idea that RPC itself is used to implement the endpoint
> mapping).  It seems a little screwy to me (especially in light of the
> chicken-and-egg issue it creates) that DCE should dictate the means
> by which you achieve the result, as opposed to the result itself; but
> that's exactly what they do, IIRC.

I just remembered why DCE specifies the endpoint mapping mechanism with 
such particularity... it needs to work across hosts (duh).

I'm going to try to look into some of the issues we've been discussing 
some more after work today; perhaps, now that we have a marshalling 
prototype that works (at least so long as there's no mismatch in data 
representation), it wouldn't be too hard to just flesh out the 
remaining marshalling features needed by the endpoint mapper.  This 
might be wishful thinking, but If DCE says we have to use RPC for this, 
they probably also provide the neccesary IDL or pseudo-IDL in the spec.

I guess I'm back to a "do it right the first time" mentality with this 
line of thought, but if I'm going to all the trouble to move the 
endpoint mapping features from the wineserver to a separate (winelib) 
executable, I'd might as well just code it to spec from the beginning.  
This would also allow us to begin interoperability testing sooner, 
which is a very good thing IMO.

-- 
gmt

"The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people"
 --President Bill Clinton, MTV interview, 1993