Re: GVariant for prez!

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

I have been asked to chime in here again...

After re-reading this whole thread, and some of the bugzilla
discussion, I come away with a lot of sympathy for Davids basic
approach, which I understood as follows:

Have an api that lets us do dbus calls using 'native' types (probably
with some way to provide necessary hints for the type-mapping
machinery). Let GVariant be used in this api, so people who prefer to
serialize in advance can do that and reap all the benefits that
GVariant may bring.

Sorry for the handwavy description here; David had a much better one upthread...

As a way of moving forward an not getting stuck forever in this
debate, I propose that it might be a good idea to:

- Move Davids gdbus work temporarily into a separate repository where
it can get early exposure and facilitate experimentation without any
stability concerns.

- Merge GVariant into this, and make gdbus use gvariant instead of dbusmessage

- Find a more suitable name for GVariant, maybe. Havoc had
'GBinaryValue' earlier...

When the lower-level parts of gdbus (ie connection and name handling)
are sufficiently baked, it should be possible to merge them into glib
while keeping the rest in the standalone repository for a little
longer.


Matthias