Re: idea on gobject-introspection / gtk-doc metadata

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

Dan Winship wrote:
> One of the gobject-introspection TODOs is:
>
>     - Write a scanner to create XML from annotated headers
>
> AFAIK, no one has put forward any suggestions about what those 
> annotations would be. gtk-sharp's parser already figures out a lot of 
> things (by assuming that the code obeys certain conventions), but there 
> are lots of other things that can't really be guessed in most cases 
> (like memory management conventions, or whether an int* is an out arg, 
> an in-out arg, or an array).

One thing I'd like to see introspectable is versioninig information
on properties & signals, right now the doc notes include "Since 2.6"
on function calls and such (it would also be nice to introspect
whether properties, signals & objects are depricated or not).

I'm not sure if it would be better to generate the introspection
metadata from the doc notes and use that in clients that use
introspection data (like language bindings and GUI builders/loaders),
or if it would be simpler to just build the introspection metadata
into GTK+ and use that metadata to generate the docs.

I'm inclined to prefer the latter, since using introspection to generate
docs is already in effect, doing the opposite seems like a double
standard fated to increase confusion and complexity in introspection
and doc generation...

But I obviously dont know enough about this gobject-introspection
project... I'll have to read up on this.

Cheers,
                                  -Tristan