Re: multiple vala versions in 3.4

["Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)" <zeeshanak gnome org>]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 9:53 AM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> hi Zeeshan;

Hi Emmanuele,

> On 23 January 2012 02:14, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeeshanak gnome org> wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 11:50 PM, Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org> wrote:
>>> 2012/1/21 Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeeshanak gnome org>:
>
>>>> There are way
>>>> 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.
>
> I don't agree with this assessment.
>
> you're just deferring the issue to every library under the sun, and
> this is very much problematic in a variety of reasons:
>
> - as a maintainer, now I'd have to care not only about introspection,
> but also about a vapi file - which is another redundant format that
> expresses the library's API; so the first thing I'd look at would be
> generating the latter in terms of the former, which introduces a build
> dependency (albeit optional) on Vala. so it's my library that now has
> to deal with the compiler and generator bugs. yeah, right: not going
> to happen.

What I was proposing wasn't so different from what you are saying
here. Vala bindings should still be generated out of gir bindings but
since gir doesn't support some of the essential features that vala
apps have been depending on for some time now, we'll need to have
*some* vala-specific metadata, at least until gir supports those
features.

If having any vala-specific metadata in a few libraries isn't
acceptable to maintainers, yeah we should first separate out the
bindings into another package and then push the bindings that are
purely generated from gir to their respective libraries.

BTW just for the record, It should be noted that gir is the cause of
the problem here not vala.

> - I have used Vala, but I'm not an expert on figuring out its quirks,
> nor am I using it for my day to day work; this means that I'll have to
> rely on Vala developers to update the Vala bindings. this means that
> Vala developers and users will now need to go through various bugzilla
> products and git repositories to fix the Vala bindings in each and
> every project that ships one.

They'll have to go through the same procedures as python and
javascript users so I don't think this is an issue. Actually this will
give good motivation to vala developers to fix/improve your gir
annotations for you.

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124