Errors and the introspection format

[Thiago Macieira]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> - servers should work as follows:
>   - if the "no reply" hint is set in DBusMessage, the server
>     can send a reply if it wants, but need not
>   - otherwise, the server _must_ send a reply, either
>     an empty success reply, a return value, or an error

Thank you for this clarification. After re-reading the spec, I can see 
this requirement there too. I just suggest adding a couple of capital 
MUST to the paragraph about this. :-)

> - this annotation should not appear in introspection results.
>   it's not a property of the interface/server, it's a property
>   of the generated code desired by the app programmer on the client
>   side.

Why not? When introspecting a remote object to make a dynamic call (i.e., 
not generated code), the binding could use this information to determine 
whether it should set the no-reply flag in the call or not.

>Looks like it's somewhat confusing to use the same file format for
>introspection data and code generation. Maybe we can find a way
>to make that clearer, e.g. we could split "interface", "client
>annotations" and "server annotations" perhaps into distinct XML
>elements?

I don't think this is a good idea. It would introduce more elements into 
the XML definition.

However, the D-Bus specification should list the well-known annotations 
that do have a meaning for all implementations -- and only those. NoReply 
and Deprecated are such cases. It may list other annotations as examples, 
but it should make it clear that they are not "well-known" and that they 
are specific to one single implementation.

The way I read it, by definition, any annotation can be safely ignored. If 
it is supposed to carry some information that should not be ignored, it 
should not be an annotation.

-- 
Thiago José Macieira - thiago.macieira AT trolltech.com
Trolltech AS - Sandakerveien 116, NO-0402 Oslo, Norway
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