Re: Introspection API

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 17:38 +0800, James Henstridge wrote:
> At the same time, C header files are missing a lot of the information 
> you'd want to include in the metadata.  You'll either end up with a lot 
> of ugly comments in the header (for an extreme case, look at something 
> like librpm's headers ...), or have the information separate from the 
> definitions (which can result on them becoming out of date).

I think magic comments are the way to go. The way to minimize them is to
follow the conventions. If an API is "normal" then all the defaults
should be right -> no magic comments. Right?

You can also have an "overrides file" rather than magic comments, as
another option.

> Having the C header files generated from a file written in some IDL that 
> can represent all the metadata would mean that the C header only need 
> include things relevant to C, and be fairly clean.

Who cares if it's clean if it's autogenerated though ;-) you aren't
going to look at it then...

I dunno. People are always free to write the IDL by hand, the feature
that can scan a header to generate the IDL is an additional feature, not
an alternate approach, the way I think of it.

Doesn't seem realistic to change all the existing gtk headers over to
being autogenerated...

Havoc