svn commit: samba r11105 - in branches/SAMBA_4_0/source: librpc/idl librpc/ndr pidl/lib/Parse/Pidl pidl/lib/Parse/Pidl/Samba/NDR

[Michael B Allen]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 10:20:06 +0200
Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> wrote:

> >> This breaks xattr binary compatibility with previous versions -
> >> is that a problem?
> >
> > I'd prefer not to break compatibility unless its really necessary.
> > Can we really not support a simple null terminated utf8 string now?
> >
> >
> > The reason I deliberately chose the old format is that it is
> > particularly simple to hand marshall. The xattr.idl is written as
> > IDL for us, but I am hoping other projects (wine, the kernel etc)
> > will support our xattr format. Keeping the format really easy to
> > hand marshall makes it easier for those projects to not use an IDL
> > compiler if they don't want to.
> >
> > It it impossible to support a simple null terminated utf8 string
> > with the new [string] approach?
> 
> The problem is not so much in that pidl can't support "simple"
> null-terminated utf8 strings, but more in the fact that it is not
> possible to use it in other IDL compilers (such as MIDL or WIDL).
> Please let me know which of the two you prefer, and I'll fix it.

How about providing an optional wire encoding in parathesis like
[string(UTF-8)] where the encoding is the standard identifier used by
iconv? This way you can keep unistr AND support [string]. This is what
I think I'm going to do with midlc but I haven't really looked into it
yet so I don't know if it works out in practice.

Mike