[Patch] Moving FD passing into the header

[Christian Dywan]

Am Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:17:25 -0400
schrieb Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org>:

> On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 3:38 PM, Havoc Pennington <hp at pobox.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > However I don't really get the argument about extending the type
> > system being disruptive, since there are other extensions also in
> > progress. You may as well dump in another one (in fact getting them
> > all done at once so bindings would update in one shot, would be an
> > admirable goal ... the feature negotiation could even be "typesystem
> > 2.0" instead of allowing subsets/combinatorics of the extensions).
> 
> Okay...that does lend itself to the suggestion of keeping the fd
> passing as an explicit type, and getting the maybe type in, and
> calling that typesystem 2.0 then.  If we're taking this approach, then
> that raises the question of other extensions, but there's nothing
> really else in the cards, is there?  Besides float I guess, but that
> one I think is fairly fringe.

That still leaves the aspect that it will no longer be possible to
serialize and copy messages according to their signature. FD is
not a flat type in the same way as an integer. It can't be stored on
disk. It can't be passed over the network. The only thing you can do is
pass it over the bus, which is what the explicit API allows.

The breach in consistency will be the same in GVariant, which can
serialize all contained types *except for* h.

And of course the type system stops being platform agnostic.

-- 
ciao,
    Christian