GLib DBus vs Python DBus

I’ve been experimenting with DBus a bit lately for some side projects im doing (more on that soon). Part of the project involves spawning a service via dbus. In python this is trivial and easily discoverable with a google query or two:

  import dbus
  bus = dbus.SessionBus()
  bus.start_service_by_name('org.gnome.Rygel1') # org.gnome.Rygel1 = service name

Ridiculously easy, right? In C using the glib dbus library things are much more difficult. A bit of googling yielded almost nothing when searching for “start service by name c glib” or variants thereof. So I did the evil thing, I checked out the python source. start_service_by_name is turns out, is a wrapper to a normal proxy call to the org.freedesktop.dbus interface function StartServiceByName:

  return (True, self.call_blocking(BUS_DAEMON_NAME, BUS_DAEMON_PATH,
                                           BUS_DAEMON_IFACE,
                                           'StartServiceByName', 
                                           'su', (bus_name, flags))) 

Alright… so now how do we do this in C? We could fiddle with dbus_g_proxy_call for a while, or find out that Maemo actually gives us the answer.

  DBusGConnection *connection = dbus_g_bus_get(DBUS_BUS_SESSION, &error);

  DBusGProxy *proxy = dbus_g_proxy_new_for_name (connection,
                                     DBUS_SERVICE_DBUS,
                                     DBUS_PATH_DBUS,
                                     DBUS_INTERFACE_DBUS);
  int result;                                                               
  dbus_g_proxy_call (proxy, "StartServiceByName", &error,
			  G_TYPE_STRING,
			  "SERVICE_NAME",
			  G_TYPE_UINT, 0,
			  G_TYPE_INVALID,
			  G_TYPE_UINT, &result,
			  G_TYPE_INVALID))

Simple, right?