libnm: deprecate synchronous/blocking API in libnm

Note that D-Bus is fundamentally asynchronous. Doing blocking calls
on top of D-Bus is odd, especially for libnm's NMClient. That is because
NMClient essentially is a client-side cache of the objects from the D-Bus
interface. This cache should be filled exclusively by (asynchronous) D-Bus
events (PropertiesChanged). So, making a blocking D-Bus call means to wait
for a response and return it, while queuing all messages that are received
in the meantime.
Basically there are three ways how a synchronous API on NMClient could behave:

 1) the call just calls g_dbus_connection_call_sync(). This means
    that libnm sends a D-Bus request via GDBusConnection, and blockingly
    waits for the response. All D-Bus messages that get received in the
    meantime are queued in the GMainContext that belongs to NMClient.
    That means, none of these D-Bus events are processed until we
    iterate the GMainContext after the call returns. The effect is,
    that NMClient (and all cached objects in there) are unaffected by
    the D-Bus request.
    Most of the synchronous API calls in libnm are of this kind.
    The problem is that the strict ordering of D-Bus events gets
    violated.
    For some API this is not an immediate problem. Take for example
    nm_device_wifi_request_scan(). The call merely blockingly tells
    NetworkManager to start scanning, but since NetworkManager's D-Bus
    API does not directly expose any state that tells whether we are
    currently scanning, this out of order processing of the D-Bus
    request is a small issue.
    The problem is more obvious for nm_client_networking_set_enabled().
    After calling it, NM_CLIENT_NETWORKING_ENABLED is still unaffected
    and unchanged, because the PropertiesChanged signal from D-Bus
    is not yet processed.
    This means, while you make such a blocking call, NMClient's state
    does not change. But usually you perform the synchronous call
    to change some state. In this form, the blocking call is not useful,
    because NMClient only changes the state after iterating the GMainContext,
    and not after the blocking call returns.

 2) like 1), but after making the blocking g_dbus_connection_call_sync(),
    update the NMClient cache artificially. This is what
    nm_manager_check_connectivity() does, to "fix" bgo#784629.
    This also has the problem of out-of-order events, but it kinda
    solves the problem of not changing the state during the blocking
    call. But it does so by hacking the state of the cache. I think
    this is really wrong because the state should only be updated from
    the ordered stream of D-Bus messages (PropertiesChanged signal and
    similar). When libnm decides to modify the state, there may be already
    D-Bus messages queued that affect this very state.

 3) instead of calling g_dbus_connection_call_sync(), use the
    asynchronous g_dbus_connection_call(). If we would use a sepaate
    GMainContext for all D-Bus related calls, we could ensure that
    while we block for the response, we iterate that internal main context.
    This might be nice, because all events are processed in order and
    after the blocking call returns, the NMClient state is up to date.
    The are problems however: current blocking API does not do this,
    so it's a significant change in behavior. Also, it might be
    unexpected to the user that during the blocking call the entire
    content of NMClient's cache might change and all pointers to the
    cache might be invalidated. Also, of course NMClient would invoke
    signals for all the changes that happen.
    Another problem is that this would be more effort to implement
    and it involves a small performance overhead for all D-Bus related
    calls (because we have to serialize all events in an internal
    GMainContext first and then invoke them on the caller's context).
    Also, if the users wants this behavior, they could implement it themself
    by running libnm in their own GMainContext. Note that libnm might
    have bugs to make that really working, but that should be fixed
    instead of adding such synchrnous API behavior.

Read also [1], for why blocking calls are wrong.

[1] https://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2008/11/nonblocking/

So, all possible behaviors for synchronous API have severe behavioural
issues.  Mark all this API as deprecated. Also, this serves the purpose of
identifying blocking D-Bus calls in libnm.

Note that "deprecated" here does not really mean that the API is going
to be removed. We don't break API. The user may:

  - continue to use this API. It's deprecated, awkward and discouraged,
    but if it works, by all means use it.

  - use asynchronous API. That's the only sensible way to use D-Bus.
    If libnm lacks a certain asynchronous counterpart, it should be
    added.

  - use GDBusConnection directly. There really isn't anything wrong
    with D-Bus or GDBusConnection. This deprecated API is just a wrapper
    around g_dbus_connection_call_sync(). You may call it directly
    without feeling dirty.

---

The only other remainging API is the synchronous GInitable call for
NMClient. That is an entirely separate beast and not particularly
wrong (from an API point of view).

Note that synchronous API in NMSecretAgentOld, NMVpnPluginOld and
NMVpnServicePlugin as not deprecated here. These types are not part
of the D-Bus cache and while they have similar issues, it's less severe
because they have less state.

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/libnm/nm-remote-connection.h b/libnm/nm-remote-connection.h
index 37ab154e95..ce6eef993d 100644
--- a/libnm/nm-remote-connection.h
+++ b/libnm/nm-remote-connection.h
@@ -59,10 +59,12 @@ GVariant *nm_remote_connection_update2_finish (NMRemoteConnection *connection,
                                                GAsyncResult *result,
                                                GError **error);
 
+_NM_DEPRECATED_SYNC_METHOD
 gboolean nm_remote_connection_commit_changes        (NMRemoteConnection *connection,
                                                      gboolean save_to_disk,
                                                      GCancellable *cancellable,
                                                      GError **error);
+
 void     nm_remote_connection_commit_changes_async  (NMRemoteConnection *connection,
                                                      gboolean save_to_disk,
                                                      GCancellable *cancellable,
@@ -72,9 +74,11 @@ gboolean nm_remote_connection_commit_changes_finish (NMRemoteConnection *connect
                                                      GAsyncResult *result,
                                                      GError **error);
 
+_NM_DEPRECATED_SYNC_METHOD
 gboolean nm_remote_connection_save        (NMRemoteConnection *connection,
                                            GCancellable *cancellable,
                                            GError **error);
+
 void     nm_remote_connection_save_async  (NMRemoteConnection *connection,
                                            GCancellable *cancellable,
                                            GAsyncReadyCallback callback,
@@ -83,9 +87,11 @@ gboolean nm_remote_connection_save_finish (NMRemoteConnection *connection,
                                            GAsyncResult *result,
                                            GError **error);
 
+_NM_DEPRECATED_SYNC_METHOD
 gboolean nm_remote_connection_delete        (NMRemoteConnection *connection,
                                              GCancellable *cancellable,
                                              GError **error);
+
 void     nm_remote_connection_delete_async  (NMRemoteConnection *connection,
                                              GCancellable *cancellable,
                                              GAsyncReadyCallback callback,
@@ -94,10 +100,12 @@ gboolean nm_remote_connection_delete_finish (NMRemoteConnection *connection,
                                              GAsyncResult *result,
                                              GError **error);
 
+_NM_DEPRECATED_SYNC_METHOD
 GVariant *nm_remote_connection_get_secrets        (NMRemoteConnection *connection,
                                                    const char *setting_name,
                                                    GCancellable *cancellable,
                                                    GError **error);
+
 void      nm_remote_connection_get_secrets_async  (NMRemoteConnection *connection,
                                                    const char *setting_name,
                                                    GCancellable *cancellable,