Re: Proposing gnome-python for inclusion in GNOME Bindings

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 16:33 +0100, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
>   I'd like to propose gnome-python for inclusion in Gnome Bindings.  For
> those who don't know, gnome-python offers convenient
> wrappers for most APIs in GNOME Developer Platform, including the
> following modules:
> 
>         gnome, gnome.ui, gnome.canvas, gnome.vfs
>         gconf
>         bonobo, bonobo.activation, bonobo.ui

Great. Well done for getting to this point.

Are those bonobo bindings really ready for API stability? I know that
the C++ bonobo bindings are not, but maybe it's easier for you.

For instance, do you have lots of examples for them, and are they being
used much?

> It also has bindings for some desktop modules:
> 
>         gtkhtml2
>         gnome.applet
>         nautilus
>         gnomeprint, gnomeprint.ui

These can not be API-stable because the underlying C libraries are not
yet API- or ABI-stable. Nor are they in the GNOME Platform, so they
don't make sense for GNOME Platform Bindings.

What happened to your plan to split gnome-python up into more modular
parts? It's well known that I am against including half-stable modules
in GNOME Platform Bindings, because I want to say simply "all of these
modules are API-stable and ABI-stable". None of the GNOME Platform
modules contain large unstable API, for instance.

Note that some distros already split gnome-python up anyway, in order to
have a sensible dependency tree, so that, for instance,
pymurraytexteditor does not depend on nautilus. But distros don't do
this in a consistent way. By doing it in the source tarballs, you would
create more consistency in the distro packages, which is what developers
actually use. 

>   I think gnome-python is the perfect complement for pygtk, if one wants
> to write a full featured GNOME application in the Python programming
> language.
>
> PS: I remind everyone about the new cvs module, gnome-python/pygnome-
> hello, demonstrating how to make a GNOME application using pygtk and
> gnome-python.  Suggestions to improve it are welcome too!

Thanks, but I don't see any use of the #! technique that we discussed,
in order to depend on a single version of Python, in order to avoid
breaking the application when Python is upgraded.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com