Re: [gnome-bindings] more notes

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

James Henstridge <james daa com au> writes:
> In a previous message, I had said that some of the sections of the new
> defs format (signal descriptions, property descriptions) were not
> very useful to interpreted languages (which is why I haven't used them in
> my defs files).
> 
> I suppose the easiest way to create this information is by writing a small
> C program that queries gtk+ for the information and then writes it out in
> the defs format.  The question is whether this is actually useful for
> compiled language bindings?  Is it worth outputing this info in defs
> format, or is it better to go to some other format (maybe directly to the
> source code for the binding?)  How do the C++ binding authors plan to
> handle this?

For C++ (or any statically compiled language) you probably want to
generate code for signals when you generate code for methods, etc., so
it's convenient to have in the defs files. 

You could write a custom C program to query GTK and write out the
info, but the idea with the defs file would be to put said C program
in one place and then just dump the output into the defs file, so you
can parse the one defs file.

For properties, in Inti so far I was just manually writing methods
that set the properties, which is sort of painful. Should probably 
instead autogenerate those methods, again the defs file is a
convenient place to have the necessary info.

Havoc