[Pythonmac-SIG] ANN: Preview of SystemConfiguration wrapper

[Bob Ippolito]

On Sunday, Oct 19, 2003, at 08:57 America/New_York, Ronald Oussoren 
wrote:

>
> On 19 okt 2003, at 9:51, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>> http://undefined.org/python/SystemConfiguration-0.1.tar.gz
>>
>> This is a source distribution, it requires PyObjC and Developer 
>> Tools.  The wrapper itself is (entirely) an ObjC framework, but it 
>> includes everything necessary for Python wrapping.  I haven't done 
>> any documentation, real tests, especially testing of the runloop 
>> integration.. but here it is if someone wants to play with it.  The 
>> ObjC is a little sloppy (three classes in one file), and the setup.py 
>> is a lot sloppy (thanks to distutils being not easily extensible), 
>> but it works.. or at least it should.
>
> I haven't looked at your code yet, but wouldn't it be better to 
> generate the wrapper using bgen?  That would make the wrapper easier 
> to maintain and easier to integrate into MacPython/the python core.
>
> The CodeGenerator scripts in PyObjC could also be coaxed into 
> generating a functioning wrapper That is, without significant changes 
> to the scripts. The prototypes are different enough to require changes 
> to the "parser".

I decided against bgen for a couple reasons:
	- bgen is hard to use
	- I'm not yet convinced that the code generators save that much time 
in the long run
	- I wrote it by mostly by hand so I know that each and every method 
has been "audited" by someone to at least look like it should work ;)
	- Using a bgen-generated Python module doesn't feel much better than 
coding in C.  These are named so that the module feels like they're 
using PyObjC.
	- SystemConfiguration is one of those 
should've-already-been-wrapped-in-ObjC-by-Apple frameworks that uses a 
lot of CoreFoundation types, so the bridge code is already in PyObjC 
for the most part (lots of CFDictionaryRef, CFArray, CFString, etc.)
	- It might be useful from ObjC someday.  Surely by someone in the ObjC 
community that isn't using any or a lot of Python yet.
	- The SystemConfiguration framework has awkward rules about when you 
need to check for errors, so I'd have to write a lot of helpers by hand 
anyway.  Since bgen helpers are in C, not ObjC, it would be much more 
of a pain in the ass to write them (i.e. more like 20 lines of code per 
hand-wrapped function instead of an average of maybe 4 here).

-bob