Introspection & compound type signatures

[Colin Walters]

On Sat, 2005-03-19 at 22:26 +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
   
> 4. Keep type attribute for primary type name, only use nested <type>
>    elements for specifying compound type details
> 
>    <arg name="foo" type="int32" direction="in"/>
> 
>    <arg name="bar" type="struct" direction="in">
>      <type name="int32"/>
>      <type name="string"/>
>      <type name="array">
>        <type name="byte"/>
>      </type>
>    </arg>

This seems a bit weird; I wouldn't just partially use the first type
attribute.  Instead I'd write it like:

   <arg name="bar" direction="in">
     <type name="struct">
       <type name="int32"/>
       <type name="string"/>
       <type name="array">
       <type name="byte"/>
     </type>
   </arg>

> Out of those my personal preference would be for example 4 since IMHO it
> provides a pretty good human readability, and its still pretty simple to
> deal with programmatically. 

If we agree that the problem we're primarily interested in solving is
making introspection XML easier to write, then this solution makes
sense.

However, it seems to me that there's other places where you potentially
want an "expanded" format, such as in dbus-viewer, or your "dpack"
thing.  And that format probably shouldn't be XML, or it's a bit too
expanded for those uses :)


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