Re: Modulesets Reorganization

[Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu vizoso collabora co uk>]

On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 21:57, Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr> wrote:
> Le dimanche 06 juin 2010 à 19:53 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso a écrit :
>>
>> Moving bindings modules to the Desktop moduleset won't make them less
>> second-class citizens as long as API that is not bindable without
>> resorting to language-specific glue code keeps being added to
>> Platform.
>>
>> Examples of this are GVariant (which affects GSettings) and GDBus, in
>> the latter this question was raised on gtk-devel but nobody showed
>> interest in how to make the new functionality available to bindings:
>>
>> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2010-May/msg00136.html
>>
>> I don't think the authors of those APIs are to blame for this, because
>> they asked for feedback before merging and nobody who cared about
>> non-C languages replied.
>>
>> It's nice that the release team worries about bindings because lots of
>> software is written for GNOME in languages other than C. But today we
>> are seeing a disproportion between the people who use bindings and
>> those that build them and it worries me a lot. What will happen to
>> those applications when old APIs such as GConf are not available any
>> more and GSettings is not available to their language?
>>
>> An action more in accordance with the intention of making bindings a
>> first class citizen would be to require new API (with exceptions for
>> low level glib stuff) to be bindable by the introspecting bindings,
>> and also maybe some thinking into why the bindings landscape is in
>> such a mess right now.
> While I agree with you case about the importance of bindings, I don't
> see why GSettings shouldn't work with bindings.

Yes, I was referring to g_settings_get_value/g_settings_set_value
which is the most general API. So while part of the functionality is
available to bindings there's some that isn't. Which wouldn't be so
bad if at least there was an alternative API for bindings that
providing the missing functionality.

Similarly, I'm sure part of the GDBus API is callable via
introspection, but some isn't.

> For GNOME Shell, we had
> a few issues with g_settings_get_strv() and g_settings_set_strv(),
> but the API was quickly improved, and now GObject introspection allows
> us to use GSettings from JavaScript via GJS without any flaw.

If GJS is able to call those methods right now, you may need to remove
some workaround there when this patch lands:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=620170

(Testing, comments and review welcome, btw)

Regards,

Tomeu