Re: [Vala] Setting prefix and paths at configure time.

["Federico Pelloni" <federico pelloni gmail com>]

2008/9/24 Andrea Del Signore <sejerpz tin it>:
> On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 23:55 +0200, Federico Pelloni wrote:
> > In my project I need to load some custom pixmaps that will be
> > installed into $prefix/share/projectname/pixmaps, with $prefix being
> > set at configure time. Classical situation for many applications. How
> > can I make my program find that files?
> > I'm using Waf to configure/build/install my application, and I can
> > have created a config.h file with those paths defined, but I don't
> > know how to access them within my .vala files.
> > I saw some projects (Valaide for example) using a "Config" namespace
> > or class, but I could not understand how it works.
> > I'd be glad if someone could explain me which direction I've to go to
> > solve this problem.
> >
> > Thank you.
> >
> > Federico Pelloni
> > _______________________________________________
> > Vala-list mailing list
> > Vala-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
>
> Hi Federico,
>
> to use your generated config.h file you have to wrap it in a vapi file
> and the compile it with your project.
>
> E.g. you have to write a config.vapi file like this:
>
> [CCode (cprefix = "", lower_case_cprefix = "", cheader_filename =
> "config.h")]
> namespace Config {
>        public const string VERSION;
>        public const string PACKAGE_VERSION;
>        public const string PACKAGE_STRING;
>        public const string PACKAGE_DATA_DIR;
>        public const string GETTEXT_PACKAGE;
>
>        .... etc etc ....
> }
>
> and then compile it with your sources.
>
> eg.
>
> valac <your source files> --vapidir ./ --pkg config
>
> or
>
> valac <your source files> config.vapi
>
> Cheers,
> Andrea

Thank you both very much, it worked like a charm.

I post here some instruction that may be useful to somebody else:

To generate the config.h with Waf you have to define your constants in
the configure method of the main wscript:
    conf.define('PACKAGE', APPNAME)
    conf.define('DATADIR', os.path.join(conf.env['PREFIX'], 'share', APPNAME))
    ...
and then write the file (at the end of configure method):
    conf.write_config_header("config.h")

Then in the wscript_build file (or build method of wscript file,
depending on your file layout) inside the sources directory you simply
have to add a line specifying the location of your config.vapi file
    obj.vapi_dirs = '../vapi'
and add the "config" package to the packages string
    obj.packages = 'gtk+-2.0 glib-2.0 gio-2.0 config'

That was enough for me to make it work.

If you want to see the full sources they're here:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~fredp/ejecter/ejecter-vala/files

Regards,
Federico