Re: Introspection API

[Todd Berman <tberman off net>]

On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 15:38 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>Trying to attack the introspection problem from the api side.
>Here is an initial api proposal for an interface repository. 
>I imagine this would be implemented on top of metadata blobs
>which are mmapped readonly, thus the various *Def objects can
>be very lightweight, essentially just a pointer to the metadata
>plus an offset.
>
>Does this look reasonable ? (except for the names, which are 
>			     completely ad hoc)
>Does it cover what is needed by language bindings ?
>Are there better ways to do this ?
>
>
>Comments would be appreciated,
>
>Matthias

I don't know if this has been covered already (looked through the
emails, and it didn't jump out at me), but it would be nice if there was
a field that covered what version the piece was added in, be it a type
or a method, or a property.

Some obvious use cases jump to mind:

glade-2 serializing glade files that don't container properties/etc for
newer gtk+ versions than what you are targetting.

allowing language bindings to support a 'this app targets gtk+ 2.x' sort
of concept, to make sure that deployment can become sane.

other use cases surely exist.

--Todd