'Returns a dict describing a given object.
what -- "distro", "profile", "system", "image", "repo", etc
name -- the object name to retrieve
flatten -- reduce dicts to string representations (True/False)'

def get_item(self, what, name, flatten=False):

    self._log(('get_item(%s,%s)' % (what, name)))
    item = self.api.get_item(what, name)
    if (item is not None):
        item = item.to_dict()
    if flatten:
        item = utils.flatten(item)
    return self.xmlrpc_hacks(item)
