Re: libthreepointzero

[Philip Van Hoof <me pvanhoof be>]

On Fri, 2006-10-13 at 09:50 +0200, Johannes Schmid wrote:

Hey Johannes,

I'm adding the tinymail mailing list in CC. Perhaps there are other
people interested in helping you? Maybe you can add the Anjuta mailing
list in CC later?

I'm also adding Robert McQueen and Rob Taylor as they are also
interested in a OO library that would ease creating things like language
bindings and utilising modern programming practises.

> Now that my exams are finished I finally decided to put this library
> into life. I have registered a new project at www.gna.org and hope that
> they will approve it soon.

Okay. If you need server infrastructure like Subversion, Trac and/or
other things, just let me know. I own hardware at a good location that
runs Xen virtualisation stuff. I also have VMWare if you need something
special like Windows.

If you need Asterix for setting up a VoIP service, just ask. IRC server,
Jabber server, whateverserver ... I have it.

> The general policy for this project should be that all added code must
> have a complete gtk-doc and or doxygen documentation included and it
> must be possible to wrap the code in all languages that provide wrappers
> for Glib. The code should contain only glib-2.0 as a hard depency for now

I agree

> What the first steps are:
> - - Copy the tinymail list and interfaces, change there namespace to Tpz
> (for ThreePointZero) and add an API documentation

Tinymail already has quite some API documentation. You are of course
allowed to copy that.

I'm of course hoping to let tinymail depend on Tpz and cut my own types
away from the framework itself. This means that Tpz shouldn't be
designed to be difficult to support on mobile & embedded appliances. I
know it's an obvious requirement, but the obvious ones are imo also
worth mentioning.

> - - Add a hash table simular to the list stuff

Yep. Good idea and useful for tinymail too. Maybe also a tree type. I
haven't developed such a type because I was a bit scared of its
potential complexity. Versus that I can solve everything in tinymail
with normal flat lists (that contain instances that can again have lists
by themselves).

An idea would be to create an adaptor type that adapts between TpzList
and GtkTreeModel, and one that adapts between TpzHash and GtkTreeModel
and one that adapts between TpzTree and GtkTreeModel.

> Next would be to create wrappers for those api (e.g libtpzmm and pytpz).
> I will be able to do the C++ stuff myself but have no idea about Python
> or Mono but I hope there will be some vulunteers.

I will do the Python once you have something that works. You can also
take a look at the tinymail Python binding. Everything is indeed
generated automatically for Python. I have three people working on .NET
bindings for tinymail (whilst not actively). Soon I will therefore have
answers for a Mono binding on Tpz.

> There is of course possible much more API that could be useful but I
> think we can discuss this later.

Indeed.

> - From my experience with libanjuta hand-coded stuff is much easier to
> handle as idl so I think we will skip this. You mentioned "Vala" in your
> blog comment, maybe you could explain to me a bit more what that is
> because google did not help me.

> Is the tinymail code LGPL? Because libtpz will obviouly be LGPL.

Yes. Tinymail is LGPL. You are hereby encouraged by its author to copy
its code.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be
blog: http://pvanhoof.be/blog