NULL Variants?

[Nate Nielsen]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
>>Nate Nielsen wrote:
>>>When sending a DBUS variant across the wire, is there a way to specify a
>>>NULL/None/Missing value? I'm using the GLib bindings. I've tried various
>>>things and gotten crashes and big bad warnings.
>
> We used to have one and deleted it on purpose, I don't remember the full
> reason why but it's probably in the list archives.

And so off I went searching various archives, and found this:

> The NIL type:
> 
>   NIL doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense as a *type*, really it's a 
>   value that's allowed in *some* languages to replace a value of any
>   type. I think we need to get rid of DBUS_TYPE_NIL since I can't make 
>   any sense out of it.

I agree that DBUS_TYPE_NILL doesn't makes less sense as a type. It makes
much more sense when used inside a variant. This is similar to how
DBUS_TYPE_DICT_ENTRY doesn't make much sense outside of an array.

That said, while reading through that thread in the list archives I
didn't find a solution. Any ideas? I need to represent missing values in
a variant (similar to SQL NULLs).

I would be bummed to have to implement a nasty hack such as Jakub's (no
offense) when using a modern system like dbus.

Cheers,
Nate