Re: multiple vala versions in 3.4

[Evan Nemerson <evan coeus-group com>]

On Sat, 2012-01-21 at 06:58 +0200, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Matthias Clasen
> <matthias clasen gmail com> wrote:
> >> On 01/19/2012 10:32 PM, Colin Walters wrote:
> >>>
> >>> But others (folks at least) fail to compile with 0.15.
> >>
> >>
> >> This question might seem a little naive, but could someone highlight me why
> >> the vala compiler can't stay backward compatible from release to release?
> >
> > Indeed. Until vala grows up a little more, its increasing use in the
> > desktop is a growing problem.
> 
> Being a maintainer of 2 vala projects in GNOME, I can tell you that
> valac itself is pretty stable these days and it gets more and more
> stable all the time. The issue is the bindings usually. There are way

I'm in charge of maintaining the bindings distributed with Vala, and I
completely agree. Historically, most of the backwards incompatible
breaks in bindings come from fixing things that kind of worked but were
really sub-optimal (for instance, using string + size_t arguments for
binary data instead of a single uint8[]).

We have been working hard this cycle to switch to generating our
bindings from GIR, which is fixing a *lot* of problems but some B.C.
breaks are pretty much unavoidable. Future cycles should be much less
tumultuous.

> too many of the libraries to take care of and on top of that they
> change all the time. Ideally each library should be providing vala
> bindings and take care of keeping it up2date. So its really not a
> fault of vala itself.

Wow, this post was very well timed. I've been working on that lately
(since it was brought up on vala-list in the context of Clutter about a
week ago) and I just pushed a patch to Vala which provides autotools
integration similar to what GObject introspection offers.

If anyone out there would like to distribute Vala bindings with their
project instead of with Vala please let us know (preferably either
through Vala mailing list or #vala on irc.gnome.org). I'm willing to
help integrate Vala bindings into your build system and assist with
maintenance.


-Evan