Re: Cooperating on .defs API specifications

["muppet" <scott asofyet org>]

(huge CC: list trimmed a bit...)


Xavier Ordoquy said:
> On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 22:01, Owen Taylor wrote:
>> Why not have .defs files, and generate the binary info from them? The
>> .defs files are already there, and they contain more information than
>> the headers do (well, comment parsing might change that, but you could
>> create comments from the .defs files :)). Just an idea...
>
> I would be interested to know what are the informations the .defs file
> have that the header don't. Maybe a more precise deprecated field, but
> out of that ?

Whether NULL is allowed for a parameter, whether a parameter may default and
if so what value should be used, whether a parameter is a return value, etc,
all of these are described in pygtk's defs files, and i believe in gtkmm's as
well.  None of that form of info is in the headers; it usually comes from
manually digging through source code and documentation.

Not that many hours ago i sat here writing about how the API definition need
to include *more* metadata of this sort....  see
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/language-bindings/2004-March/msg00062.html

That thread mentioned switching to a more detailed XML format for the defs.  I
think that's A Good Idea; binding code generation would simply be an exercise
in XSLT.  :-)

-- 
muppet <scott at asofyet dot org>