[Telepathy] telepathy-spec and properties

[Simon McVittie]

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On Tue, 05 Feb 2008 at 19:41:58 +0100, Will Stephenson wrote:
> Properties defined in the telepathy spec with tp:property are discarded along 
> with every other tp: namespaced element when generating the introspection 
> xml.  Is there a reason for this?  They should be introspectable too.

The <tp:property> element indicates a property used with the
org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Properties interface - they're not related to
D-Bus core Properties (org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties), which use the
<property> element. See my mail "Properties vs Properties" for more details.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.freedesktop.telepathy/1159

They're not part of standard D-Bus introspection, and would cause its DTD
validation to fail. They're also inappropriate for introspection,
because their access rights (whether reading, writing, both or neither
is possible) can change at any time, and because a Telepathy interface
is not guaranteed to have all its properties - the <tp:property> element
has the semantics of "if this interface has this property, then it has
this meaning", whereas the standard D-Bus core <property> has the
semantics of "this interface definitely has this property".

Telepathy.Properties can be "introspected" using the ListProperties() method.

As I explained in my mail "Properties vs Properties" I'm considering
replacing the Telepathy.Properties interface.

Regards,
    Simon
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