Introspection

[Grahame Bowland]

Hi all

I'm fairly new to dbus so sorry if my terminology is off. I've been trying to 
write a program that displays names available a bus similar to the 'kdcop' 
program. I'm just after a few tips - I'm using the Python bindings for dbus.

So I want to write a simple gui/console program that will show available 
names, and then the a representation of the interfaces / methods available on 
each of the names. If someone has already done this, please tell me so I'm 
not pointlessly duplicating effort! The objective is to make it really easy 
for people developing (eg. scripts) to figure out what methods applications 
are providing for them.

Once I have called ListNames() on /org/freedesktop/DBus I'm trying to call 
Introspect() from org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable on each of the names. 
This seems to work OK for org.freedesktop.DBus, com.redhat.dhcp, 
org.freedesktop.NetworkManager and many other things. Yet for 
org.freedesktop.Hal my call times out:
dbus_bindings.DBusException: No reply within specified time

I've got no idea why this is happening.. does anyone know? I'm running dbus 
from Ubuntu breezy (0.34-1ubuntu4). If it's just something that happens and 
must just be 'dealt with' then what's the best way to work around it?

Thanks!
Grahame