Re: Support vala plugins in gnome-settings-daemon

[Timo Kluck <tkluck infty nl>]

2011/11/7 Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>:
>> > 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.
> Being uncomfortable with writing the plugins in C is a pretty good
> reason. But...

> This is something that we would want in gnome-settings-daemon, but we
> already have plugins for this sort of functionality (see the orientation
> plugin), and it seems to me that the majority of the work is below
> gnome-settings-daemon itself (kernel driver to report the orientation,
> and/or the status of the swivel, whitelisting of Wacom touchscreen
> devices).
For my HP laptop, most of the lower level things seem to be in place
(the hp-wmi and hp-accel drivers).

>> > and that, as maintainers, we would prefer
>> > seeing plugins written in C).
>> Can you explain why that is?
> Because:
> - Vala is an immature language, and we very often have to make changes
> just because Vala changed.
> - It creates C source code which is hard enough to debug when we're
> talking about a stand-alone application, but when you're talking about a
> daemon that runs for the whole length of the session, you want to have
> control over how your memory is managed.
> The problem isn't so much reading or writing Vala (it's close enough to
> other languages that one can "pick it up"), it's that it's not mature
> enough to give us maintainability, or debuggability.
I guess this is a sound reason.

> For your particular problem, the amount of code required in
> gnome-settings-daemon to implement the functionality is minimal.
That's probably true.

> The
> problem is the work required in the lower levels of the stack. If you're
> interested in the details for those, I'll add some more details to:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624880
I'd be very interested. Let me offer you my help in getting this to
work. I could do some coding, too; I'd love the opportunity to learn.