Re: Cooperating on .defs API specifications

[Murray Cumming]

On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 19:50, Andreas Rottmann wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> [Gauche and Bigloo GTK+ folks CC'ed]
> 
> I just finished my first pass through the GTK+ .defs, in preparation
> for making guile-gobject support GNOME 2.6. Due to the huge size of
> the API, this took me most of today afternoon. I think it would be
> definitly worth centralizing the maintainance of these files. 
> 
> AFAIK, at least pygtk and guile-gobject use those files. James, how do
> you feel about maintaining these cooperativly? In the near future
> (with some luck in the next two weeks) the current guile-gobject
> "monolith" project will be split up into several pieces, managed in
> different Arch[0] packages. I think it would be a good idea to have a
> seperate "defs" package, containing only the .defs files for all
> (well, all that we already have .defs files for) GNOME APIs. There
> will be branches for each released GNOME version (starting with 2.6).

If we do this, let's have the defs in GNOME's cvs. I guess we could have
a gnome-defs module, with sub-directories for each GNOME module, such as
gtk+, atk, libgnomeui, etc.

> This means everybody interested will be able to check the "defs"
> directory out, and plug it somewhere into their project tree, just
> issuing a "tla update" to stay on track. Also, every project may fork
> off (no write access or whatsoever required, thanks to Arch) and have
> their local changes and generic improvements, which can be easily
> merged back.
> 
> What about the other Schemes (Bigloo, Gauche) and Common Lisp? How do
> you currently generate your bindings? Since the .defs files have
> (simple) Scheme/Lisp syntax, you are obvious candidates for basing
> your wrappers on them ;-).

gtkmm uses them. For the methods, we use the output of
pygtk/codegen/h2defs.py almost unchanged. The other stuff needs to be
generated with different utilities, so we keep them separate.

Sharing of .defs should be a reasonable aim for the GNOME 2.8 cycle.

-- 
Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
address@hidden