Inclusion of documentation in introspection data?

[Tako Schotanus]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

>What John says about experimenting with it as a custom annotation then
>we could add it post-1.0 seems sensible. If it uses too much bandwidth
>we could add some kind of introspect method that lets you specify
>annotations to exclude or something like that later on.
>
>  
>
Ok, but that's less backward compatible, not that it will actually break 
anything but if future introspection data suddenly start passing 
megabytes of annotations programs compiled against older versions would 
suddenly become a burden on system resources, wouldn't they?

So maybe introspection should by default leave out all annotations or 
something like that? Probably not, I imagine.

Another option would be to distinguish between annotations that add 
actual machine-usable information and annotations that are only there  
for the benefit of us humans (like documentation).

Of course in the end it all depends on how much the introspection 
feature is going to be used, but it seems logical that  if we start 
passing around MBs of data (even while filtering out the annotations you 
know are  bandwidth eaters there could still be new ones you didn't know 
about) some possible uses of introspection will made more difficult. 
(Don't know, you want to expand your spam mail filtering script with 
some call to a DBus service which has to generate a proxy on the fly 
using the introspection data for example ;-)

Cheers,
-Tako