DBUS message formats

[Gerrit van der Bij]

Thnx for the swift response.

Please take note that it is not my intention to offend any work or
people on the D-Bus project. I have the outmost respect for all the
time, ingenuity and effort people put into these projects. Please accept
my apology if you felt otherwise.

My two cents are that future versions of the D-Bus specification could
benefit from taking on the ASN.1 notation, which is generally used in
RFCs for describing data structures. The ASN.1 notation translates into
a binary format using the Binary Encoding Rules (wich are also specified
by the standard). A normal SNMP-packet is in fact a BER encoded datagram
containing a variable number and types of data. What's more, it allows
thesame interface to be used for different versions of the protocol, and
is highly scalable on message lengths and so on.

Also note that the message formats of D-Bus and binary encoded ASN.1 are
very much alike. The average length of a message would be roughly
thesame. 

Sure there are formatting differences, and these would likely require a
serious change in the D-Bus API code. 
But this suggestion is no reason to change any release planning for
D-Bus version 1.0 or the development of any follow-ups, simply because
it works fine for what it's  intended to do - and most of all: it's a
suggestion/inquery.

Well, as I said, these are my two cents. Thank you for taking time to
read this.

l8rs,

Gerrit

PS :After >15 yrs of function-model programming, you can imagine that
OOP requires some structural changes under my thinking cap..



> The only thing that uses XML is the introspection format.  The message
> format is binary and being that we are almost ready to ship 1.0 unless
> there is a really good reason to switch, we won't.  Many smart people
> have worked on D-Bus and given their input.  We value yours but it is
> kind of late to the game.  We feel our approach is the right one and if
> it is not then let it be bested by real world alternatives rather than
> theoretical standards.
> 
> BTW OO programming is a way of thinking not a language.  D-Bus's API is
> very much centered around objects.