D-Bus 1.3.1 (2010) introduced the standard "PropertiesChanged" signal
on "org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties". NetworkManager is old, and predates
this API. From that time, it still had it's own PropertiesChanged signal
that are emitted together with the standard ones. NetworkManager
supports the standard PropertiesChanged signal since it switched to
gdbus library in version 1.2.0 (2016).
These own signals are deprecated for a long time already ([1], 2016), and
are hopefully not used by anybody anymore. libnm-glib was using them and
relied on them, but that library is gone. libnm does not use them and neither
does plasma-nm.
Hopefully no users are left that are affected by this API break.
[1] 6fb917178a
Some properties in NetworkManager's D-Bus API are IPv4 addresses
in network byte order (big endian). That is problematic.
It is no problem, when the NetworkManager client runs on the same
host. That is the case with libnm, which does not support to be used
remotely for the time being.
It is a problem for an application that wants to access the D-Bus
interface of NetworkManager remotely. Possibly, such an application
would be implemented in two layers:
- one layer merely remotes D-Bus, without specific knowledge of
NetworkManager's API.
- a higher layer which accesses the remote D-Bus interface of NetworkManager.
Preferably it does so in an agnostic way, regardless of whether it runs
locally or remotely.
When using a D-Bus library, all accesses to 32 bit integers are in
native endianness (regardless of how the integer is actually encoded
on the lower layers). Likewise, D-Bus does not support annotating integer
types in non-native endianness. There is no way to annotate an integer
type "u" to be anything but native order.
That means, when remoting D-Bus at some point the endianness must be
corrected.
But by looking at the D-Bus introspection alone, it is not possible
to know which property need correction and which don't. One would need
to understand the meaning of the properties.
That makes it problematic, because the higher layer of the application,
which knows that the "Nameservers" property is supposed to be in network
order, might not easily know, whether it must correct for endianness.
Deprecate IP4Config properties that are only accessible with a particular
endianness, and add new properties that expose the same data in an
agnostic way.
Note that I added "WinsServerData" to be a plain "as", while
"NameserverData" is of type "aa{sv}". There is no particularly strong
reason for these choices, except that I could imagine that it could be
useful to expose additional information in the future about nameservers
(e.g. are they received via DHCP or manual configuration?). On the other
hand, WINS information likely won't get extended in the future.
Also note, libnm was not modified to use the new D-Bus fields. The
endianness issue is no problem for libnm, so there is little reason to
change it (at this point).
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1153559https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1584584
This makes it easier to install the files with proper names.
Also, it makes the makefile rules slightly simpler.
Lastly, the documentation is now generated into docs/api, which makes it
possible to get rid of the awkward relative file names in docbook.
