PIDL, ethereal, etc.

[tridge at samba.org]

Mike,

 > Eventually I have to polish up the C stub emitter for my compiler and try to
 > push that. It handles the odd constructs pretty well and it would be great
 > if we were all using midl compatible IDL.

I agree that PIDL might not be the final solution for Samba, and I
certainly would be happy to look at using your compiler when it is
ready. PIDL is a bit too hackish in places, and supporting some of the
more esoteric midl features is difficult.

I would like to keep the PIDL extensions, however. We have benefitted
a lot from the builtin string conversion, the auto-generated print
functions and some of the other additions, so before we switched
compiler we'd need to add support for those.

I'd also like to keep the in/out structure interface. That is what
gives us the ability to pass around generic pull/push functions, as C
just can't handle variable argument functions being passed as function
pointers and called by a generic driver routine. By making every NDR
marshall/unmarshall routine take the same form we can call these
routines with no knowledge of the underlying IDL, which means we can
use generic code that uses NDR. We take advantage of that ability in a
lot of places, and I expect that to increase.

Cheers, Tridge