Re: new module proposal: gobject-introspection

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 7:22 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeenix gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 12:05 AM, Colin Walters <walters verbum org> wrote:
>> We've made a good
>> amount of progress in allowing Vala to be rebased on introspection as
>> well (though there is one major blocker still left for that).
>
>   The nested namespace issue you mentioned below?

Yes.

>  Isn't death of gir-repository awaiting for moving all gir/typelib to
> respective libraries rather than for applications to stop depending on
> gir-repository?

Well, there's death and then there's the zombie phase afterwards that
all software goes through.

What I mean is basically that once gnome-shell,
gnome-games and anything else in the core is using typelibs built
from the source library, I'll declare it dead, rather than waiting until
every single library listed in g-ir-repository has it.  If gir-repository
lives on in a weird undead state after that, that's not too big of
a deal.  However I personally don't plan to spend a lot of time keeping it alive
for operating system vendors which aren't building GTK+ introspection
still 6 months from now.

>> 2) API/ABI stability.  I'm going to try really hard on this.  If we end
>> up doing nested namespaces for Vala some things will get harder,
>> but we'll see.
>
>  Talking of namespaces, is it correct that gir does not allow
> multiple libs to share a namespace? If so, that could be bigger issue
> than not supporting nested namespaces AFAICT.

You want two shared objects which just get blended into the same GI namespace?
That's actually trivial, the shared-library attribute takes a comma separated
list.

We were actually using this for a while to implement C "overrides",
where importing Gtk would pull in libgtk-x11-2.0.so and libgtk-addons.so.
We've long since moved to just using gtk directly however now that C
accessors exist for all of the widget flags, etc.

But nothing stops one from using this facility now if you want it.  Just
pass --library multiple times to the scanner.