[RFC] Standard documentation strings

[Sanel Zukan]

Hi all,

I my recent development of DBus Explorer tool [1], I found one feature
quite handy: documentation strings as part of introspection data.
DBus Explorer, if found them, will use them alongside method or
signal prototype and display it in tooltip.

However, this feature differs between implementations and bindings:
GDBus would use org.gtk.GDBus.DocString annotation and EggDBus (is it
still used?) has similar approach. However, I noticed some Qt
introspection xml files would use <tp:docstring> tag, and I'm not sure
is it stripped by binding tool when the source code is created.

Following the path of GDBus (as I subjectively find it leaner), I'm
planning to add similar annotation in edelib (the main EDE [2] library
which has own DBus binding). However, before doing so, is anyone
interested we (try to) make this annotation standard?

For example, it could be named 'org.freedesktop.DBus.DocString' and
used with the similar rules used by GDBus; or they can differ.

This feature can be also explored by languages already have builtin
docstring support, like Python or LISP, when creating service code
that will dynamically generate introspection replies.

What do you think about it?

Thanks.
Sanel

[1] http://sanelz.blogspot.com/2012/08/exploring-desktop-objects-2.html
[2] http://edeproject.org