Inclusion of documentation in introspection data?

[Tako Schotanus]

Robert McQueen wrote:

>John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
>  
>
>>I was thinking of adding it as an annotation.  In fact python can do
>>this without spec changes if we want to.  We eventually wanted to have
>>it so you could do print proxy_obj.__doc__ and get documentation.  The
>>biggest problem is bandwidth.  Good documentation can easily become
>>bigger than the introspect data itself.  Do we want to go down that
>>road?
>>    
>>
>
>Yeah thats what we were thinking about too. You could perhaps add a
>layer of indirection like an annotation which says there is
>documentation available, and a method to request them by? Would allow
>things to be a bit lazier, but would the Python bindings end up just
>getting all the strings, just causing a load more bus round trips?
>
>
>  
>
Or two different ways of asking for introspection data: terse vs full.
Of course this either means another method in the Introspection 
interface or an argument to the existing method.

For hand-crafted introspection data you could just say that 
documentation should be as short as possible but that doesn't work of 
course for generated bindings.

But it sounds good, anything that favors "discovery" where you can just 
look around on the bus to see what services are available and what 
actions they support is okay in my book :-)

Cheers,
 -Tako