[PATCH wayland] connection: Print the content of arrays in closures

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 4 December 2017 at 08:08, Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Dec 2017 17:08:15 +0000 Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
>> On 10 July 2017 at 19:28, Emmanuel Gil Peyrot
>> <emmanuel.peyrot at collabora.com> wrote:
>> > The current behaviour when WAYLAND_DEBUG is set is to print “array”,
>> > which is quite unhelpful.
>> >
>> > This patch prints a list of the bytes present in the array.  It doesn’t
>> > try to interpret it as uint32_t or anything, leaving that to the reader
>> > because this information isn’t present in the protocol description.
>>
>> To be honest, I'm not really wild about this one. All the array users
>> I know of (key/button, xdg surface states) are uint32_t. I'd prefer to
>> add a pretty-printing hint to the protocol - this could specify how to
>> interpret arrays, and also scratch my long-standing itch of printing
>> uints with %x rather than %u when it makes sense to ...
>
> just a side note, if you start working on that, do also think of
> bindings for (strongly) typed languages. ISTR requests to add type
> information so that better bindings could be generated, and the
> problem was where to stop defining the type system. I'm pretty sure if
> printing hints are added, people will use them for bindings, whether we
> wanted or not.

Here's a strawman.

Since libwayland allows the signature to contain unknown/new values,
as a hint, optionally allow the 'a' type to be preceded by:
  - one character of either 'X', 'I', or 'U', indicating respectively
that the value should be pretty-printed as hexidecimal / signed int /
unsigned int, followed by
  - either '1', '2' or '4' to indicate the byte width of the type
(respectively 8/16/32 bits)

Similarly, allow the 'u' type to be preceded by 'X' indicating that
the value should be pretty-printed in hex.

Cheers,
Daniel