"direct" properties are the latest preferred way to implement GObject
base properties. That way, the property meta data tracks the
"direct_type" and the offset where to find the data in the struct.
That way, we can automatically
- initialize the default values
- free during finalize
- implement get_property()/set_property()
Also, the other settings operations (compare, to/from D-Bus) are
implemented more efficiently and don't need to go through
g_object_get_property()/GValue API.
Certain properties need to release memory when destroying the NMSetting.
For "direct" properties, we have all the information we need to do that
generically in the NMSetting base class. In practice, this only concerns
string properties.
See _finalize_direct() in "nm-setting.c".
However, if the NMSetting base class takes care of freeing the strings,
then the subclasses must not also unref the variable (to avoid double free).
Previously, subclasses had to opt-in for the base class to indicate that
they are fine with that.
Now, let the base class always handle it. We only need to make sure that
classes that implement direct string properties don't also try to free
the values during destruction.
These functions tend to have many arguments. They are also quite som
boilerplate to implement the hundereds of properties we have, while
we want that properties have common behaviors and similarities.
Instead of repeatedly spelling out the function arguments, use a macro.
Advantages:
- the usage of a _NM_SETT_INFO_PROP_*_FCN_ARGS macro signals that this
is an implementation of a property. You can now grep for these macros
to find all implementation. That was previously rather imprecise, you
could only `git grep '\.to_dbus_fcn'` to find the uses, but not the
implementations.
As the goal is to keep properties "similar", there is a desire to
reduce the number of similar implementations and to find them.
- changing the arguments now no longer will require you to go through
all implementations. At least not, if you merely add an argument that
has a reasonable default behavior and does not require explicit
handling by most implementation.
- it's convenient to be able to patch the argument list to let the
compiler help to reason about something. For example, the
"connection_dict" argument to from_dbus_fcn() is usually unused.
If you'd like to find who uses it, rename the parameter, and
review the (few) compiler errors.
- it does save 573 LOC of boilerplate with no actual logic or useful
information. I argue, that this simplifies the code and review, by
increasing the relative amount of actually meaningful code.
Disadvantages:
- the user no longer directly sees the argument list. They would need
cscope/ctags or an IDE to jump to the macro definition and conveniently
see all arguments.
Also use _nm_nil, so that clang-format interprets this as a function
parameter list. Otherwise, it formats the function differently.
A MAC address is a relatively common "type". The GObject property is of type string,
but the D-Bus type is a bytestring ("ay"). We will need a special NMSettInfoPropertType.
Note that like most implementations, the from-dbus implementation still is based
on GObject setters. This will change in the future.
Also note that the previous compare function was
_nm_setting_property_compare_fcn_default(). That is, it used to convert
the property to GVariant and compare those. The conversion to GVariant
in that case normalizes the string (e.g. it is case insensitive). Also,
only properties could be compared which were also convertible to D-Bus
(which is probably fine, because there is no guarantee the profiles that
don't verify can be compared).
The code now uses the direct comparison of the strings. That mostly
preserves the case-insensitivity of the previous comparison, because
the property setters for mac addresses all use
_nm_utils_hwaddr_canonical_or_invalid() to normalize the strings.
This is subtle, but still correct. Note that this will improve later,
by ensuring that the property setters for mac addresses automatically
perform the right normalization.
Various NMSetting API would accept a property_idx parameter. Together
with the NMSettInfoSetting instance, this was useful to find the actual
NMSettInfoProperty instance.
The idea was, to provide the most of the functionality. That is, if you
might need the property_idx too, you had it -- after all, the
property_info you could lookup yourself.
However,
- literally zero users care about the property_idx. The care about
the property_info.
- if the user really, really required the property_idx, then it
is a given that it can be easily computed by
(property_info - sett_info->property_infos)
We encode the default value "direct" properties in the GParamSpec.
But we also avoid CONSTRUCT properties, because they have an overhead
and they are generally odd for the settings.
So up to now, it was cumbersome to explicitly set the default value,
but it was also error prone.
Avoid that by always initializing the default value for our "direct"
properties.
NMSetting instances either have no private data, they use
g_type_add_class_private(), or they embed the private data in the
NMSetting struct.
In all cases, we can find the private data at a fixed offset. Track that
offset in the NMSettInfoSetting meta data.
This will be useful, because properties really are stored in simple
fields, like a boolean property can be stored in a "bool" field. We will
extend the property meta data to track the offset of this property
field, but we also need to know where the offset starts.
"libnm-core/" is rather complicated. It provides a static library that
is linked into libnm.so and NetworkManager. It also contains public
headers (like "nm-setting.h") which are part of public libnm API.
Then we have helper libraries ("libnm-core/nm-libnm-core-*/") which
only rely on public API of libnm-core, but are themself static
libraries that can be used by anybody who uses libnm-core. And
"libnm-core/nm-libnm-core-intern" is used by libnm-core itself.
Move "libnm-core/" to "src/". But also split it in different
directories so that they have a clearer purpose.
The goal is to have a flat directory hierarchy. The "src/libnm-core*/"
directories correspond to the different modules (static libraries and set
of headers that we have). We have different kinds of such modules because
of how we combine various code together. The directory layout now reflects
this.
2021-02-18 19:46:51 +01:00
Renamed from libnm-core/nm-setting-bridge.c (Browse further)
