Exposing some type details in the introspection XML?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fr, 15.05.20 14:01, Simon McVittie (smcv at collabora.com) wrote:

> On Fri, 15 May 2020 at 02:08:57 +0200, Marc-André Lureau wrote:
> > Has there been some attempt at exposing higher-level types, or type
> > description, other than just type signatures in the introspection XML?
>
> There have been several, but there is no standard for it.
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus/-/issues/120 is the feature
> request. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus/-/issues/141 is also
> related.
>
> I think the best approach is probably to define a more detailed
> documentation format (either XML or something more human-readable and
> human-writable), and have a tool that can process it to generate
> (a) HTML documentation, and (b) the current introspection language.

Hmm, in sd-bus we generally go the other way: we generate XML from our
C structures rather than generate C structures from XML.

To us it would actually be pretty cool if we could synthesize the XML
structures from C definitions of the structures too...

That all said, maybe if there's somebody who wants to work on this:
maybe XML is a shitty choice for introspectionin 2020. maybe if the
introspection is improved we should trust D-Bus' own marshalling enough so
that it can encode its own introspection, and thus replace XML for
this with native marshalling.

> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus/-/issues/158 is a more ambitious
> version, redefining the introspection interface by replacing the XML
> blobs with D-Bus structured types.

Ah, yeah. Philip is my hero. And I mean:
a(sa(sa(sa(sgya{sv})a{sv})a(sa(sga{sv})a{sv})a(sgya{sv})a{sv})a{sv}) ←
that's just so delicious! Just think about how much more awesome this
signature string could be if there were structures.

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering, Berlin