D-BUS: a systemwide bus / IPC system
The link goes to a message by Havoc Pennington describing D-BUS, a IPC technology being developed for use in Red Hat, and perhaps as a future (think 18 months) replacement for DCOP and maybe Bonobo's IPC mechanism.
Sounds nice, at least what I can understand of the specs, and adopting it shouldn't cause any big trauma on the KDE side, since our DCOP classes are autogenerated by macros anyway. Hopefully, it may even be source compatible.
Lots more information, including the specs and an interesting take on KDE-GNOME cooperation by Miguel de Icaza if you follow the links a little.
God does Mailman threading suck! But that was a good read... The Miguel's stuff is in the March archive for the desktop-devel-list for anyone looking for it.
I don't we can truly switch to a different IPC format in a fully source-compatible manner since a lot of places still use QDataStream directly/manually to marshall DCOP arguments for calls (as opposed to the new nice-and-magic DCOPRef template stuff; obviously the receiving end stuff is auto-gen'ed).. However, one could probable just encapsulate DCOP over DBus by using some sort of a raw/unformatted message feature.. With that BC would probably be possible too.. But wire compat... Well, let's not talk about that :-)