Re: Issues with capability bits and meta-data in kdbus

Michele Curti
2015-04-23T08:39:40Z

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 04:02:34PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 10:35 AM, Michele Curti <michele.curti@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Just out of curiosity, would you like to change something in dbus design,
> > if you didn't have to worry about ABI breaks and the like?
> >
>
> Good question. I can't remember any big-picture things, I'm sure the
> current maintainers and users have a longer list. :-) There are a
> variety of little small things, some examples I can immediately think
> of:
>
> * the ad hoc authentication protocol is sort of ugly
> * the byte order marker in every message is silly
> * protocol version in every message is useless
> * Ryan Lortie's nice fixes in GVariant, which I think kdbus adopts (
> https://people.gnome.org/~ryanl/gvariant-serialisation.pdf ), for the
> most part these are 'cleanups' but nullable types ("maybe" types for
> Haskell fans) are a notable semantic addition
> * specify how it works on Windows, the Windows port last I checked
> (years ago) didn't do things in a Windows-sensible way
> * specify what happens when resource limits are reached
> * wouldn't use XML for introspection data these days
> http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-specification.html#introspection-format
>

Nice, thanks!

It seems that all of these are userspace related only. Yes I saw a "gvariant
readme" in systemd sources, now I understood what it is (I'm not an expert) :D

My only fear was that kdbus was trying to keep something that even dbus himself
don't want. But it seems that this is not the case.

Thanks, regards,
Michele