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th/libnm-dbus-rework-1] various patches for libnm and NMRefString

Closed Thomas Haller requested to merge th/libnm-dbus-rework-1 into master

This is the first of a series of upcoming patches that will aim to rework (improve :) ) libnm.

At this point,

  • it just adds two utilities that are so far unused (but will be used).

  • also, it drops unused code from NMSecretAgentOld that still assumed there could be private D-Bus sockets.

In particular, NMRefString is something I wanted for a long time.

In the past, I did nm-ref-string, but that was NACK-ed. Also, it followed a different approach back then:

  • it exposed strings as const char *, instead of having a NMRefString struct (like GRefString does)
  • it does not supported interning, but only reference counting.

There is also GRefString, which serves a similar purpose, but makes some design decisions differently.

While there are pros and cons for each options (including whether to have such a helper at all), I think this is the overall best solution. And I intend to use that.

The usecase will be when tracking D-Bus objects. Those objects have D-Bus interfaces (strings like org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Device.Wired), properties (strings like "HwAddress"), and object paths (like "/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Settings/22"). These strings are "arbitrary", in the sense that we cannot g_intern_string() them, because the application would leak them without freeing them ever. We should deduplicate them and also be able to compare them with pointer equality. That's what NMRefString gives.