Re: GNOME 3 cleanup status update

[Simon van der Linden <svdlinden src gnome org>]

Paollo Borelli wrote:
> As a user of the python bindings a clarification of the current status
> of things and the remaining TODO list would be very helpful. I admit I
> have not been following closely, but I bet I am not the only one who
> does not know the answers to do these questions:
>
>  - how far is pygi from being production ready? What is missing?

Far away. Except Tomeu, nobody tried to use it really.

Callback and virtual function support should land relatively soon. 
That's an important piece that is missing.

Argument marshalling is still basic (hash tables, lists, and arrays get 
passed by value), and this causes issues to bind some libs (GUPnP for 
instance).

...

>  - which packages are needed to use pygi bindings?

GObject-Introspection and PyGObject

>  - how do pygi bindings play with current bindings? Can they be mixed
> in the same application? If yes, mixed how (e.g. can bindings to the
> same lib be used together)?

Static and dynamic bindings can be combined provided the dynamic 
bindings don't depend on libraries whose dynamic bindings are being 
used. Static bindings are not aware of dynamic bindings and may register 
duplicated wrappers.

>  - how much different is the api? How big is the porting effort? Is
> there still a way to provide "pythonic" api e.g. functions returning a
> tuple?

The "raw" API is more systematic, probably less Pythonic than static 
bindings. However, one can still override wrappers in Python.

>  - what is the status of pygi and python3? Could it make sense to
> target python3 with pygi so that people make a single transition in
> their code?

PyGI is not compatible with Python 3 (yet). We need PyGObject to be 
compatible with Python 3 first.

>  - what is the status of pygi (and introspection in general) with
> regard to portability to Windows and OSX?

No idea.

Cheers,

Simon