Re: [Gexiv2] Hello?

[Robert Park <rbpark exolucere ca>]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Adam Dingle <adam yorba org> wrote:
> yes, most of us here at Yorba are subscribed, anyway.  Gexiv2 is alive and
> well, though I'm not aware of any projects other than Shotwell that are
> using it at the moment.

I was concerned because the list archives stop dead in January 2011, a
year and a half ago ;-)

> I think introspection support would be great.  I've just created a feature
> request:
>
> http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/5456

Ah, thank you.

> As for help, well, if you have any questions about gexiv2 we're here to
> answer them.  Otherwise, I can really only point you to
>
> https://live.gnome.org/GObjectIntrospection

Well, let me give you a bit of context. I'm primarily a Python
programmer, with extensive experience *using* introspected GObject
libraries (Gtk, Gdk, Gio, Pango, Clutter, Champlain, etc etc etc). My
motivation for wanting to use GExiv2 from Python is that I am
currently using pyexiv2 for that purpose, but it doesn't support
python 3, and it's development has stalled because it uses
boost.python to wrap libexiv2, and porting boost.python to python3
seems to be stalled/incomplete. The point is, it seems to me that
introspecting GExiv2 *could* end up being less work than porting
pyexiv2 to python3.

Now, I unfortunately have precious little experience with C. I can
kind of read it, but I can't write it. At this point, I've been able
to run g-ir-scanner and g-ir-compiler *just barely*, such that I can
import GExiv2 in python and poke and prod at the API, but none of it
actually seems to work (constructors are returning 'void' objects).

So, I know I need to write some annotations in the source in order for
g-ir-scanner to produce not-broken introspection data, and I've been
referring both to the link above as well as to the libchamplain source
code for help.

There are a couple things that have me confused:

* The documentation for g-ir-scanner says that it only scans .h files
for annotations, but in libchamplain I am seeing lots of annotations
in the .c files, so I wrote a couple annotations in
gexiv2-metadata.cpp just to see what would happen, and of course,
nothing happened. So what's the deal with that?

* g-ir-scanner also says that it only works on "C based" source code.
I'm *assuming* that includes C++, correct?

Thanks again!

-- 
http://exolucere.ca