DBUS introspection (Was: DCOP interface in kicker broke compatibility?)

[Waldo Bastian]

On Monday 07 February 2005 06:45, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 23:20 -0500, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> > Oh. When I read that, I didn't interpret that as
> > telling me that callers can TRUST that they'll
> > get a reply, merely that it's "expected".
>
> Well, they can't *trust* necessarily; we are dealing with network IPC
> here. Nothing is guaranteed. So there are timeouts and so forth.
>
> I changed some "expected" to "required" in the spec to make it clearer
> that apps must not deliberately muck this up, though.

Wouldn't it be easier to just say "must not reply"? It seems easy enough to me 
to check at a relatively low level for this flag so that even when a binding 
might be inclined to generate a reply on a higher level, it could simply be 
dropped at the low level before such reply actually hits the bus.
E.g. dbus_message_new_method_return() could check for it and either simply 
refuse directly or flag the message to be dropped when it gets to 
dbus_connection_send().

I don't see the point in allowing a reply. (Other than for keeping backwards 
compatibility with a previous version of the spec, but for that purpose you 
can just say that when you send with NO_REPLY_EXPECTED you must still be 
prepared to get, and ignore, a reply if it happens to be send anyway.)

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian at kde.org   |   Free Novell Linux Desktop 9 Evaluation Download
bastian at suse.com  |   http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/eval.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/attachments/20050207/9dda0a6a/attachment-0001.pgp