Re: GVariant for prez!

[Dan Winship <danw gnome org>]

Ryan Lortie wrote:
> The type system, of course, is that of DBus.
> 
> I love your feedback.  Please give it all to me.

I took at a look at GVariant from the perspective of "could I make
libsoup's XML-RPC (and future JSON) code use GVariant instead of
GValue". (For more background, see the thread starting at
http://www.mail-archive.com/gtk-devel-list gnome org/msg09241.html).

But the answer to the question is no, because GVariant doesn't have a
(strongly-typed) date/time type like XML-RPC does. (Yes, I could do
something like decide that inside libsoup, the int64 type means time_t,
but that's lame, and would interfere with using the XML-RPC int64
extension type that some services support, and it doesn't solve the
general problem.)

So, my feedback is, if the type system is explicitly just D-Bus and
nothing else, shouldn't it be called "GDBusType" or something? (I'm not
saying it's *bad* that it's D-Bus-specific, just that it should be more
explicit about it.)

(Alternate possibility: add a way to include type tags, so that callers
and callees can agree that a particular "x" is to be treated as a time_t
and not a generic int64. Eg, a signature of ":x" would mean a (string)
type tag followed by an int64, but it would be distinct from "sx" or
"(sx)".)

-- Dan