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

[Jelmer Vernooij]

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Hi Michael,

Michael B Allen wrote:

> 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.

We used to have a data type 'string' (as you might have seen) from
which unistr was derived. We are now migrating to using [string]
everywhere, but optionally also specifying the character set (for
automatic conversion, very similar to what you propose), with the
"charset" attribute. For example:

[charset(UTF16),string] uint16 *foo_bar;

The allowed arguments for charset() are currently UTF8, DOS, UTF16,
UNIX and UTF16_BE, but I'd be happy to change that if there is good
reason to.

Cheers,

Jelmer
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