Re: Support vala plugins in gnome-settings-daemon

[Timo Kluck <tkluck infty nl>]

2011/11/7 Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>:

Hi Bastien, thanks for your feedback!

> We use the gnomecc list (copied) for gnome-settings-daemon and
> gnome-control-center development, or you can find us on #control-center
> on GIMPNet IRC.
Thanks; I subscribed to the list and removed gnome-desktop list from the cc.

> Is there any particular reason why you want to develop plugins in vala?
For me personally, I would be unconformable writing plugins in C. I
don't really doubt that I could do it, but I would be very happy with
Vala doing the type system registrations the right way(tm) without me
doing the details.

I'm considering contributing a plugin for convertible tablets (such as
Dell XT2, Lenovo X220T, HP Touchsmart tm2) that can handle things like
rotating the display when the lid is swiveled. There's a lot of
daemons for that that each work for only one or two models, and I
thought I could unify that. Part of the project would be some
additions to the existing xrandr plugin and those would of course be
in C. But for the new plugin, I thought making a setup for Vala
plugins might save time in the long run.
(NB of course, I will ask you for feedback about these things later on)

> gnome-settings-daemon is not a general-purpose application, and I do not
> know of any third-party plugins to it (meaning that all the plugins live
> in gnome-settings-daemon
That's why I thought I should put this in-tree as well.

> and that, as maintainers, we would prefer
> seeing plugins written in C).
Can you explain why that is? For example, because of familiarity with
C, because all the others are already in C, or for some other reason?
One of the beautiful things of the plugin system you have set up is
that it easily allows for what I'm trying.

Of course, it does require that at least one maintainer is familiar
with Vala -- someone should be able to review these things. Perhaps I
should stress that this does not add any extra dependencies because
the generated C files are distributed along with the vala sources. You
only need the vala compiler when using gnome-settings-daemon directly
from git. Similarly, the plugins do not suffer any performance penalty
from being written in Vala.

Best regards,
Timo