DBus API problems & UTF-8

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 03:32:02PM +0300, Kimmo H?m?l?inen wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 15:47, ext Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> ...
> > If you're not already using UTF-8 in your C program, then its at most one 
> > single method call to convert. Unless your strings are absolutely enourmous
> > the performance hit of the conversion shouldn't show up as a large hotspot.
> > In any case this is a small price to pay for cross-application interoperability. 
> 
> Ok, you all have a good point. However, would you oppose an additional
> DBus type for NUL-terminated strings (e.g. DBUS_TYPE_CSTRING)? There is
> quite a bunch of existing C code around that could benefit from it.

The trouble, is when a client talks to a service, it now has to decide
whether to use C String, or UTF-8 string. So, either every application
(or the language bindings) would need to be updated support both formats, 
or you'd end up with a situation where only some apps spport C strings, 
which wouldn't be good for interoperability. Since there is no compelling
reason for most apps to support C strings, unfortunately I think we'd
end up in the latter situation which isn't a very desirable result.

Regards,
Dan.
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