[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: dbus-core 0.6 and dbus-client 0.2

[Will Thompson]

Hi John,

Very nice work! As it happens, Dafydd Harries and I wrote another native
implementation of the D-Bus protocol, but yours is much more complete,
and the documentation/commentary is ace. A refreshing change from the
daily pain of libdbus and dbus-glib... :-)

I'm looking at modifying Bustle (which draws sequence diagrams of D-Bus
traffic; <http://www.willthompson.co.uk/bustle/>) to log raw D-Bus
messages to a pcap file, rather than the current custom text format that
includes just the information from the message the UI needs alongside a
timestamp. Then the UI would read the pcap file, and feed the data
through a D-Bus parser before processing it further. Now that there's a
decent D-Bus implementation available, it seems like a good time to have
a crack at this.

However, I can't find a way to feed a bytestring to dbus-core and get
back a ReceivedMessage. Is this deliberately not exposed? While it's
obviously not useful in general, it would be very useful for Bustle.
(The alternative is to construct a fake connection to myself and feed
messages down it, I guess.)

Also, the Haskell bit of Bustle is licensed under the LGPL (v2.1 or
later), but dbus-{core,client} are under the GPL v3. Could you be
convinced to reconsider the licensing of your packages? D-Bus is often
used to allow free and non-free applications to play nicely together,
letting free software be used in situations where it would otherwise be
passed over; while I for one don't plan to write any non-free D-Bus
applications in Haskell any time soon, it'd be nice not to write Haskell
off for such applications.

-- 
Will