clarity of concept [LWN.net]

clarity of concept

Posted Nov 16, 2014 21:23 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: clarity of concept by ceplm
Parent article: Kdbus meets linux-kernel

> Which is exactly what I was trying to say: WTF we need any interfaces here at all.
Because that allows an object to implement multiple interfaces that contain methods of the same name but with different semantics.

There's an interesting blog post that explains why this is important:
http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/modules-m...

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clarity of concept

Posted Nov 17, 2014 7:16 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (2 responses)

I was missing a word in my rant: why we need MANDATORY interfaces? Surely they could be optional, and for large objects they could be essential (although, it could be argued that too big objects are a design bug), but why should the time zone setting object (with just a few methods) should have multiple interfaces.

clarity of concept

Posted Nov 17, 2014 11:24 UTC (Mon) by mchapman (subscriber, #66589) [Link] (1 responses)

> I was missing a word in my rant: why we need MANDATORY interfaces?

Please see my earlier post. All D-Bus objects can -- and in my experience, usually do -- implement methods and properties from multiple interfaces. Now it may be perfectly logical to have a "default" interface per object which handles unqualified names, but that seems like it's best just handled by your client library. If your client library doesn't make this easy for you, use a different one.

Anyway, this discussion is pretty moot. The D-Bus specification [1] has been around for over a decade, and although it may have its warts it works well enough most of the time. You can argue that it's wrong, but it's not going to change the fact that it already exists.

[1] http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-specification.html

clarity of concept

Posted Nov 17, 2014 21:37 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

First, of course, this discussion is completely moot, I don’t expect anything to change. However, I don’t think it is useless to discuss completely theoretical questions. Actually, I really do enjoy, that I could finally express my thoughts and doubts about the API.

Second, argument “API sucks, but it could be meliorated by library” is in my opinion just that, an admission that API sucks.