Manpages for DBus services? was Re: starting Fedora Server SIG

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 15:51 -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 3:25 PM, David Malcolm <dmalcolm at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > Brainstorming here, but do DBus services come with some form of
> > documentation format?
> 
> Not intrinsically, we decided it would be a bad idea to put docs in
> the introspection XML.  However,
> 
> > If so, it it possible to generate a man page per
> > service, and ship it in the rpm, as one step towards making DBus more
> > accessible to old-school Unix types?
> 
> Various projects do different things for interface documentation; for
> NetworkManager in particular see here:
> http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManagerDBusInterface

Actually, the docs are autogenerated from the introspection XML.  For
the moment, see:

http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/NetworkManager/spec.html

Yes, all the docs need improvement and cleanup.

Dan

> 
> The documentation is not yet shipped in the package that I see though
> (it probably should be in NetworkManager-devel).
> 
> For ConsoleKit there are docs in the shipped introspection XML:
> /usr/share/dbus-1/interfaces/org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager.xml
> 
> Eventually we'll straighten this out and probably have some sort of
> standard IDL and associated documentation, and probably have -devel
> packages build and ship HTML formatted docs.  Up until now mostly
> these interfaces have been for freedesktop/GNOME/KDE hackers to use
> internally, not really for 3rd party developers.
>