JSON for introspection

[Felipe Gasper]

> On Feb 7, 2019, at 7:55 AM, Simon McVittie <smcv at collabora.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 07 Feb 2019 at 06:33:06 -0500, Felipe Gasper wrote:
>> I’m just looking for a lighter way to describe introspection than XML. CBOR, Sereal, etc.
> 
> Remember that D-Bus is designed to be interoperable between multiple
> implementations.
> 
> If we introduce a new introspection format, then for the foreseeable
> future, every library that generates introspection (GDBus, QtDBus,
> dbus-python, etc.) has to know how to generate both, in case it's
> being accessed by a tool that only knows the old XML form; and every
> tool that consumes introspection (gdbus introspect, d-feet,
> dbus-python, etc.) has to know how to parse both, in case it's being
> used to debug a service that only knows the old XML form.

I wasn’t thinking of an actual change to the protocol.

I’m just wanting, for my own project, to describe a D-Bus introspection using simple lists and dictionaries, which I’d then convert to the standard XML format. I wondered if there happens to be such a mapping that someone has already worked out.

-F