Re: API changes

["Tambet Ingo" <tambet gmail com>]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:48 AM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 18:17 +0100, Will Stephenson wrote:
>  > I understood the applet merges APs in the same network for presentation to the
>  > user, is that what all the calls to ether_aton() in the NM and applet sources
>  > are doing?  And HAL uses uint64 for mac addresses. At a guess, you're
>  > converting from that, using hex-and-colons for dbus transport, converting it
>  > to ether_addr for comparisons, and converting it back again for the UI.
>
>  NM pulls it right out of SIOCGIFHWADDR which is struct ether_addr (ie,
>  char[6]).  It does get converted from struct ether_addr to a string with
>  ether_ntop for D-Bus transport.
>
>  1/2 dozen to one, 6 to another.  I think the decision to be made is to
>  either leave it as-is (ie, strings), or convert the type to byte array
>  with the exact length of the device type's hardware address (char[6] for
>  802.11, 802.3, and 802.15, char[7] for GSM & CDMA).

That's an easy decision. Since there isn't significant space savings
between byte array and string (byte array with a couple of colons and
'\0') and there's nothing else for UIs to do with these other than
print out (as strings), there's no reason to change anything.

Tambet