Shell communication channel: simple, half-assed or fully-arsed?

[Alan Griffiths]

On 12/12/13 12:35, Thomas Voß wrote:
> This could quite easily be implemented on top of:
>
>   https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/cpp/google.protobuf.dynamic_message

Summarizing discussion from hangout...

The use of a definition language and code generation isn't a short term
option - but is nice for the future.

Short term we're going with:

Mir client and server provide a "-private-def" package with C++
interfaces into the communications protocol that allows shell+toolkit(s)
to pass arbitrary protobuf messages.

This will allow unity8/platform-api to prototype and refine interfaces
before they are migrated into the core Mir APIs

This mechanism will need some methods for identifying and transmitting
FDs across the socket (e.g. a special field name.) This is something
that was not allowed for in the raw buffer approach described in the OP.