moving file descriptor passing into a header

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 13.04.10 17:27, Colin Walters (walters at verbum.org) wrote:

> We were discussing some DBus related stuff at this GSettings hackfest,
> and related to the GVariant/GBus work, we were thinking it'd be good
> to take the file descriptor bits out of the type system, and move them
> into a message header.  This makes things significantly saner for
> GVariant and anyone else reimplementing the protocol.

Could you be more specific?

So what you would take out there is that you can actually attach context
to specific file descriptors and hence meaning and instead have them in
list without context except "they belong to this message". Sounds like a
step backwards to me.

Could you explain to me what the problem is with considering an fd a
complex data type like any else that requires a special "deep" copy
instead of a simple memcpy()?

What exactly makes it so hard for type systems like GVariant to support
this? I mean, it supoports other "deep" types, I presume, and is this
one really tthat differnt?

Is this about portability? or about out-of-fd handling? what is
this about?

Lennart

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