DBus-cxx 2.0 status

[Robert Middleton]

It's time for a status update on DBus-cxx version 2.0! I've been
working hard on version 2.0 for a while now, but the past few months
have been very productive. For various reasons, this has actually
turned into a much larger project than originally planned, however the
upgrades should be well worth it.

With the official release of libsigc++-3.0, the dependency on
libsigc++ has been updated. This now requires your compiler to
support at least C++17. While this is a higher version of C++ than I
originally hoped for, this makes certain parts of the code much easier
to implement(example[1]). This also means that methods with an
arbitrary number of arguments are now supported, as opposed to the
previous limitation of 7(due to libsigc++-2.0).

I have started on an upgrade guide on how to upgrade to V2 that can be
found here[2]. The good news is that most of the upgrades can be
accomplished with a simple sed script that can be found in the doc/
folder. Note that the API is still unstable and thus is likely to
change before the final version is released, but it should not affect
most client code.

For those of you interested in the current status, I have also created
a project on Github that is tracking the current status of all
issues[3].

If anybody wants to test out the new branch and/or has more ideas for
unit tests that should be made, that would be greatly appreciated. I
want to have a very robust test suite before I delve deeply into
attempting to allow using a different backend for dbus-cxx(e.g. GDBus,
sd-bus). You may find the new branch here[4]. Any help that you can
provide on sample code, testing examples to ensure that they are all
working, or documentation would be greatly appreciated.

-Robert Middleton

[1]: https://github.com/dbus-cxx/dbus-cxx/blob/a9b260890f6fd66ec6848a228ea3131a7f9c40c7/dbus-cxx/utility.h#L216
[2]: https://github.com/dbus-cxx/dbus-cxx/blob/a9b260890f6fd66ec6848a228ea3131a7f9c40c7/doc/v2_migration.md
[3]: https://github.com/dbus-cxx/dbus-cxx/projects/1
[4]: https://github.com/dbus-cxx/dbus-cxx/tree/dbus-cxx-2

[Nick Burkitt]

Hi Robert.

This sounds great. We haven't updated this part of our product in a while, but when you have something stable, I'll probably give it a try. Thanks for all the work you've put in on this project. Having a D-Bus interface to our service's functionality allows our customers to develop their applications in whatever language they prefer, and that's proven to be a huge plus.

-Nick