Re: GVariant for prez!

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2009-04-09 at 11:38 -0400, Dan Winship wrote:
> 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)".)

Didn't dbus have user tagged types like this at some point?