[Pythonmac-SIG] ANN: Preview of SystemConfiguration wrapper

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 19 okt 2003, at 15:25, Bob Ippolito wrote:

>
> 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

Yup, that's why PyObjC contains Scripts/CodeGenerator :-), writing 
those scripts was easier than  getting bgen to work correctly.

As I never managed to get a working bgen setup I cannot say if bgen is 
really hard to use or if it's just the lack of documentation that makes 
it so hard to use.

> 	- I'm not yet convinced that the code generators save that much time 
> in the long run

An important advantage of code generators is that you end up with a 
consistantly translated API. This may not be the perfect API, but makes 
it so much easier to use existing documentation and examples (all 
targetting the C API) when writing Python scripts that use the wrapped 
API.

> 	- 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.

See me previous point, a more python-like interface is not necessarily 
an advantage. That won't keep me from using your wrappers though, the 
look pretty usefull as they are.

> 	- 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.)

I've been thinking about this. Should there be a 'PyCF' "project" for 
building good wrappers for CoreFoundation(-based) APIs? This could be 
done by changing the bgen scripts in MacPython, adapting the 
CodeGenerator scripts from PyObjC or writing something from scratch.

> 	- 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).

Your ObjC wrappers seem to use a seperate function for raising the 
exception. A simular solution could be used in bgen-based wrappers 
(which could use ObjC to access the contents of CFArray/NSArray 
instances).

Ronald