Re: GVariant for prez!

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2009/5/4 Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>:
> On Sat, 02 May 2009 at 13:02:39 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
>>  o I'm worried that GVariant supports a superset of the D-Bus
>>    protocol.
>
> Right, ideally GVariant as merged in GLib should support exactly the D-Bus
> protocol (either by code deletion, #if 0, or getting more things into the D-Bus
> protocol).

This argument has been repeated a few times by a few different people
so I feel the need to oppose it. It has primarily been brought up by
those with heavy roots in DBus-land and with my
"get-dbus-in-glib"-goggles on I can understand this argument. Taking
those goggle off a bit I think that supporting just the DBus protocol
would be a mistake.

Because GLib lacks a more powerful serialization mechanism people are
doing bad things. One thing I've mentioned earlier is that I've seen
people using complex DBus-activation setups where one really just
wanted to store a structured file somewhere for some other app to
read.

Another thing is the ever-growing usage og SQLite for even trivial
tasks. The common chant that SQL-schemas aren't part of the public API
makes this even more problematic for deep integration on the desktop.

Talking SQL - keeping strictly to the DBus protocol makes it
impossible to serialize SQL result sets which is a pretty steep price
to pay (lacking a NULL).

> GStored? GStorage? GRepresentation? (OK, that one's too long.) GBlob?

I agree that the GVariant name might not be the clearest from an
API-design pow. GStructure, GStruct, GConstruct, GForm, GCell? The
mathematician in me really likes GForm, but that is probably because
mathematicians always call stuff they can't name properly "forms" :-)

Naming aside, my main point is that I've missed a good serialization
framework in GLib on several occasions - ending up abusing GKeyFiles
or GConf (there I said it, kill me now). If I had an on-disk
serialization format that I could make part of my public API that
would just be wicked! DBus is almost just a collateral bonus to me
here.

-- 
Cheers,
Mikkel