IDL language

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 08.05.09 13:47, David Zeuthen (david at fubar.dk) wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 2009-05-08 at 19:06 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > If D-Bus was new and not yet as widely used adopting a different
> > language than XML could have been a good idea. But now?
> 
> My experience with several dialects of introspection XML (at least
> three: Telepathy, ConsoleKit/DeviceKit-disks and eggdbus dialects) is
> something I'd rather be without. It's hard to get right, easy to get
> wrong and if you show it to someone, they just give you that blurry look
> like it's Ada or FORTRAN or ask you if you made money on fixing Y2K bugs
> in a previous life. So, no, D-Bus introspection XML is not something
> that _I_ want to show to a new person on my team, for example (not
> unless I wanted them to nominate me as the PHB on The Daily WTF or
> something).

Maybe you are doing something wrong if you just show the XML sources
around. I mean, stuff like the following doesn't look too bad, does it?

http://avahi.org/download/Server.introspect.xml

This is pretty old stuff, now if we'd have the documentation stuff
properly integrated into the XML format this could look much, much prettier.

> For your consideration:
> 
> eggdbus xml for org.freedesktop.DBus:
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~david/eggdbus/tree/src/eggdbus/org.freedesktop.DBus.xml
> 
> DeviceKit-disks xml for org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Disks.Device:
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/DeviceKit/DeviceKit-disks/tree/src/org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Disks.Device.xml

I don't find this particular example that unreadable. And with some
XSLT sugar this could actually really nice. Much nicer than a C
inspired low-level syntex ever could. But yepp, that's just a matter
of taste again.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4