Porting to pydbus

[patocarr]

Hi there,

I've been hacking at bluezero code attempting a port away from python-dbus and onto pydbus. I have some application successfully running on pydbus and thought I could bring that knowledge here. Unfortunately, the application is proprietary so I can't share it, but much of its structure is making its way as open source in the fork. If/when I get it the way I want it, I might port the app to use bluezero.
Pydbus in my experience works fine for a central device, but have big issues making it work as a peripheral or any exposed dbus service; something python-dbus does quite handily, as shown in the BlueZ examples. I believe it's due to having issues with a parallel service, such as DBus.ObjectManager along with org.bluez object paths. I spent days working this out but couldn't get pydbus to cooperate.
I also took the liberty of changing the GATT arguments a little, to avoid having duplicated Device instances inside each GATT service. This should be a level 100 change that shouldn't affect upper layer applications though.
Thanks to studying bluezero code and its testing structure, I got some experience with python testing that previously didn't have. I much appreciate the work that has gone into bluezero for this.
Unfortunately, until pydbus fixes its issues or someone finds a way to get it to work, the complete port to it will stall to the parts that don't properly work.

Thanks @ukBaz and all the contributors,
-Pat

[ukBaz]

Thanks for the feedback @patocarr. Glad to hear that Bluezero has helped in some way.

It is a shame about pydbus not having the functionality currently. I remember you also commented on the issue on the pydbus library
LEW21/pydbus#55

I see there are a couple of Python projects looking to bypass the DBus API and work directly with the Host Controller Interface (HCI) sockets:
https://github.com/frawau/aioblescan
https://github.com/TheCellule/python-bleson/wiki

It will be interesting to see how things develop in this area.

I am going to close this issue as there is no immediate action required. Please feel free to open a new issue if/when you believe we should look at moving Bluezero to Pydbus.

Thanks,
Barry