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Bug 768555 - "man gdbus": unclear what "serialized GVariant" means for args to "gdbus call"
"man gdbus": unclear what "serialized GVariant" means for args to "gdbus call"
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: glib
Classification: Platform
Component: docs
unspecified
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: gtkdev
gtkdev
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2016-07-08 08:42 UTC by Stephan Bergmann
Modified: 2018-05-24 19:00 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Stephan Bergmann 2016-07-08 08:42:33 UTC
(At least observed with glib2-2.48.1-1.fc24.x86_64:)

"man gdbus" states

>  call
>      Invokes a method on a remote object. Each argument to pass to the
>      method must be specified as a serialized GVariant except that
>      strings do not need explicit quotes. The return values are printed
>      out as serialized GVariant values.

There is no (link to a) definition of "serialized GVariant" in this man page, and searching the web for that term finds documents like <https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GLib/GVariant/Serialisation> or <https://people.gnome.org/~desrt/gvariant-serialisation.pdf>.  But those look like specifications of a binary format, and "gdbus call" presumably expects a textual format?  (Also, the binary format would not explain the above remark that "strings do not need explicit quotes", as there appear to be no explicit quotes for strings in the binary format.)
Comment 1 Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig) 2016-07-08 09:13:57 UTC
It uses the format described here: https://developer.gnome.org/glib/stable/gvariant-text.html
Comment 2 Philip Withnall 2018-01-19 13:02:07 UTC
(In reply to Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig) from comment #1)
> It uses the format described here:
> https://developer.gnome.org/glib/stable/gvariant-text.html

Yup. Patch welcome to fix this. We should probably say ‘GVariant in text format’ rather than ‘serialized GVariant’.
Comment 3 GNOME Infrastructure Team 2018-05-24 19:00:01 UTC
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