Re: making Python GStreamer plugins work

[John Ehresman <jpe wingide com>]

Owen Taylor wrote:
> I think it should be possible to do basically the same thing in Python
> by creating the GObject out of GObject.__new__() rather than out of
> GObject.__init__(). 

This would break backwards compatibility.

>  __new__() calls g_object_new()  calls ... ->init() which allocates
>    the python object and binds it to the GObject
>
> This is not 101% compatible with the current system but all the
> incompatible cases I can come up with are pretty artificial (*)

It would break this:
  class MyButton(gtk.Button):
    def __init__(self):
      gtk.Button.__init__(self, 'My Default Text', True)

This could be rewritten to use __new__, but it would need to be rewritten.

> But in such cases all GObject additions would be would be a slightly
> cleaner version of John's technique of passing data to the constructor
> via magic properties... whether the constructor triggers GObject
> creation or whether GObject creation triggers the constructor is
> going to make a difference in how things are ordered.

Yes, using a magic property is a bad idea -- there's a reason the patch 
was never committed.  It's better to use thread local storage, although 
that depends on no callback occurring between the call to g_object_new 
and the GType constructor.  For bindings that have the language specific 
constructor trigger GObject creation (like pygtk), it would be better to 
have a factory function that would get all the properties passed in and 
be responsible for returning a valid GObject.

John