Net::DBus and qdbus disagreement

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 04 Jan 2012 at 11:37:11 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 7:10 AM, Simon McVittie
> <simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk> wrote:
> > In my opinion, there is a "portable subset" of D-Bus that interface
> > designers should use, and that portable subset doesn't include
> > overloading.
> 
> I agree. Btw, this is similar to back when a KDE developer (a QtDBus
> user) complained on the list that a D-Bus property name in udisks
> contained dashes. This ended with us recommending that property names
> SHOULD be CamelCase (but still allowing any UTF-8 string).

We may have made that recommendation informally, but the D-Bus Specification
doesn't say so (the closest it gets is saying that
'Interface, signal, method, and property names are "WindowsStyleCaps"'
under "Naming Conventions"). Patches would be very welcome.

I think the correct semantics are that property names MAY be any non-empty
D-Bus STRING (strict UTF-8 with no '\0'), but SHOULD follow the syntactic
restrictions of member names, and are conventionally in CamelCase.

> In addition to the "portable subset", it's probably also worth
> pointing out somewhere that it's useful for a D-Bus binding to have
> facilities for override names.

This is a good idea (although the relevant bit of dbus-python would need a
significant redesign before it could deal with that on the service side).
I'm not sure where we'd say it, though; is there an existing collection of
advice for implementors, perhaps on the wiki?

    S