memory freeing necessary?

[Matthew Johnson]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, Havoc Pennington wrote:

>>> IOW exceptions can't be added if they break the semantics, so your 
>>> previous bullet point applies ;-)
>> 
>> So can we please have annotations that list them? If it's part of the
>> API/ABI it should be in the introspection data.
>
> Please re-read what I said above, and the huge previous thread on this.
>
> If your statement is true "If it's part of the
> API/ABI it should be in the introspection data" then one of two things is the 
> case.
>
> 1) By "introspection data" you mean "the docs in the introspection data," 
> something I already agreed with in the previous thread and nobody has 
> disagreed with.

OK, this should possibly be moved to the docs thread.

> 2) By "introspection data" you mean "method signature" in which case
> I will leave you the task of including the complete documented semantics of 
> all methods in the type signature of methods, and wait to hear back on how 
> that is possible.
>
> For reasons covered extensively in the previous thread, there is no 
> meaningful way to put exceptions in the the dbus signature either, so they 
> are not in the signature; they are in the documentation of the semantic 
> behavior of the ABI.

I think this is exactly the role of annotations. You can of course throw
any error from any method and you need to be able to cope with this, but
they are better structured and able to be dealt with in the binding /
automatically than general documentation. You want a hint to the system
that there may be an exceptional condition here. This is what
annotations are for. It's exactly like NoReply. You don't have to honour
it, but you can if you want to.

Matt


-- 
Matthew Johnson
http://www.matthew.ath.cx/