Unix FD Passing

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 20.05.09 16:55, Havoc Pennington (hp at pobox.com) wrote:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Lennart Poettering <mzqohf at 0pointer.de> wrote:
> > I am not sure I fully understood your question, but I think generic
> > demarshalling code like that wouldn't make sense anyway. Because in
> > contrast to other fixed data types unix fds are special: you need to
> > close() them after use.
> 
> Hmm, I think such code does exist now though (I think the Qt
> bindings do it?)

If Qt does it is broken I'd say. 

Generally, software shouldn't try to demarshal stuff it doesn't
understand. And "half-understanding" is still "not understanding". ;-)

> I'm wondering a bit if the user of libdbus should have to enable
> feature extensions ... that would get pretty gross in the long term.
> But the problem is that if libdbus supports fds, but the binding
> doesn't, then in effect we don't support fds - but we're advertising
> that we do.
> 
> We need to at least document that get_fixed_array will fail on fd arrays.

I have added a bunch of comments explaining this now.

Lennart

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