- On Linux (and FreeBSD) nss-mdns has been providing decent low-level integration of mDNS at the nsswitch level for ages. In fact it even predates Avahi by a few months. Porting it to Solaris would have been almost trivial. And, Sun engineers even asked about nss-mdns, so I am quite sure that Sun knew about this.
- You claim that our C API was internal? I wonder who told you that. I definitely did not. The API has been available on the Avahi web site for ages and is relatively well documented [1], I wonder how anyone could ever come to the opinion that it was "internal". Regarding API stability: yes, I said that we make no guarantees about API stability -- but I also said it was a top-priority for us to keep the API compatible. I think that is the best you can get from any project of the Free Software community. If there is something in an API that we later learn is irrecoverably broken or stupid by design, then we take the freedom to replace that or remove it entirely. Oh, and even Sun does things like that in Java, Just think of the Java 1.x java.lang.Thread.stop() API.
- nss-mdns does not make any use of D-Bus. It never did, it never will.
- GNOME never formally made the decision to go Avahi AFAIK. It's just what everyone uses because it is available on all distributions. Also, a lot of GNOME software can also be compiled against HOWL/Bonjour.
- Implementing the Avahi API on top of the Bonjour API is just crack. For a crude comparison: this is like implementing a POSIX compatiblity layer on top of the DOS API. Crack. Just crack. There is lot of functionality you can *never* emulate in any reasonable way on top of the current Bonjour API: properly integrated IPv4+IPv6 support, AVAHI_BROWSER_ALL_FOR_NOW, the fact that the Avahi API is transaction-based, all the different flag definitions, and a lot more. From a technical persepective emulating Avahi on top of Bonjour is not feasible, while the other way round perfectly is.
Let's also not forget that Avahi comes with a Bonjour compatibility layer, which gets almost any Bonjour app working on top of Avahi. And in contrast your Avahi-on-top-of-Bonjour stuff it is not inherently borked. Yes, our Bonjour compatibility layer is not perfect, but should be very easy to fix if there should still be an incompatibility left. And the API of that layer is of course as much set in stone as the upstream Bonjour API. Oh, and you wouldn't have to run two daemons instead of just one. And you would only need to ship and maintain a single mDNS package. Oh, and the compatibility layer would only be needed for the few remaing applications that still use Bonjour exclusively, and not by the majority of applications.
So, in effect you chose Bonjour because of its API and added some Avahi'sh API on top and this all is totally crackish. If you'd have done it the other way round you would have gotten both APIs as well, but the overall solution would not have been totally crackish. And let's not forget that Avahi is much more complete than Bonjour. (Maybe except wide-area support, Federico!).
Anyway, my original rant was not about the way Sun makes its decision but just about the fact that your Avahi-to-Bonjour-bridge is ... crack! And that it remains.
Wow, six times crack in a single article.
Footnotes:
[1] For a Free Software API at least.