GVariant support for Unix fds (Was Re: GDBus/GVariant plans for next GLib release)

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Thu, 2009-10-15 at 10:54 -0400, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> >    2. GVariant doesn't yet handle the new 'h' type (e.g. unix fd)
> 
> Holy crap!  This is insane!  I had no idea that this was going on
> upstream -- I might have had something to say about it.
> 
> It seems kind of unfortunate that the DBus type system used to consist
> only of things that could be serialised and now it consists of a special
> case that can't be.  That's really difficult to deal with from the
> standpoint of GVariant (which, really, is a serialisation framework,
> after all).
> 
> Now that it does exist upstream though, I guess that means that GVariant
> really ought to support it.  This is going to require some thinking....

Yeah, I think we need to support this from the get-go. 

Anyway, at the end of the day, UNIX fds are just integers so if you
require that users (such as GDBus itself and apps using GDBus) keep the
fds alive until the method/signal has been sent/received you should be
able to treat them as such. Anyway, it's probably more complicated than
this.

    David