Beta release of the Java implementation of dbus

[Havoc Pennington]

John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> My only issue is that if we put it in people will start writing apps to
> 1.1 protocol and I would rather see new types being used once the new
> protocol is ubiquitous.  Chicken and the egg problem I guess but we
> don't want to get into the situation where people are just waiting for
> the next version because their app won't run under the stable version.
> We want D-Bus versions to be long lived.  Stability is more important
> than features here.  However adding float won't break backwards
> compatibility and ISV's who write to the 1.0 protocol can be assured
> that at least the bus won't reject their message.  Application writers
> need to be sensitive to not breaking compatibility though.
> 

If we made libdbus automatically fall back to encoding the floats as 
doubles when the peer/daemon did not support float, it might not be too 
bad. Though there is some tricky implementation here since the message 
is constructed before we know which connection(s) it will be sent over, 
so most likely the fallback mode would have to copy the message once per 
destination connection that did not support float.

The minimum pain to get this in would probably be implementing that, 
plus the feature-detection stuff in the auth protocol, unit tests for 
both, plus adding it all to the spec (auth protocol change and new 
typecode).

There are a few other outstanding patches that really should be making 
progress too, but I haven't had time to work on anything and don't 
expect to soon unfortunately... I think there are even a few list 
patches that didn't land in bugzilla...

Havoc