Re: New Bindings modules

[Andreas Rottmann <a rottmann gmx at>]

Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> writes:

>> And here we go. We[0] think guile-gtk project will is ready to join
>> the GNOME Platform Bindings. We can hopefully make the May 10th date,
>> but it's a bit terse. We have the following modules wrapped:
>> 
>> guile-glib: GLib and GObject
>> guile-gtk: ATK, GDK, GTK+ and Pango
>> guile-libgnome: libgnome
>> guile-libgnomeui: libgnomeui
>> guile-libgnomecanvas: libgnomecanvas
>> guile-libglade: libglade
>
> Excellent, I have seen comments from people saying that they want this.
> I guess we are talking about this project:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/guile-gtk/
>
> I can't find any recent tarball releases so I'll start invetigating more
> when you make the first GNOME 2.7.1 tarballs.
>
Yes, we don't have any tarballs of the GTK+2 series yet. I can provide
a snapshot tarball (including all currently wrapped bindings) at any
time if anybody is interested in that, however.

> It looks like you have only recently started to wrap GTK+ 2 rather than
> GTK+ 1.2, so I'll need convinving that you are not rushing into API
> freeze too soon. I'll be hoping to see lots of examples/tests/demos. Can
> you give me some more detailed information about your recent
> activity/progress/popularity/feedback?
>
Well, I have no estimate of our popularity. Andy Wingo did a lot of
work on the "higher level" bindings (GTK+ and "above"), while I tend
to focus on the lower-level binding (GLib) and the wrapper generator
we use (see http://www.nongnu.org/g-wrap). Andy also has written a
bigger application that uses the bindings, see [0].

There are some examples/demos as well as a minimal test suite for the
core (GObject stuff). Recent activities:

* Restructuring of the Archive, to have each binding of an upstream
  module in its own Arch category (akin to a CVS module, for those CVS
  people ;-)). We now have the infrastructure to bundle any set of
  module bindings in a tarball (e.g. single big tarball, each as
  separate tarball, ...).

* Some work to allow to have default and output arguments for the
  wrapper functions

* Upgrade of the GLib and GTK+ .defs specifications to their 2.4 API

> Do you have some way to do parallel-installable versions of the API if
> you need to break things in future?
>
This is a point not yet solved. How do other projects (Python, Ruby,
Perl) solve this?

> By the way, I encourage everybody to use some bug-tracker - preferably
> the GNOME bugzilla. That makes it easier for me, as well as you, to
> track progress. But it's your project and you are the boss.
>
I'm not really very knowledgeable with any BTS except debbugs; but
both bugzilla and the savannah bug tracker are ok with me, presuming
they allow email notification of bug changes.

[0] http://ambient.2y.net/soundscrape/

Andy
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