[Kde-bindings] Qyoto + ARGB... is becoming painful for me.

[Richard Dale]

Hi William

On Friday 22 February 2008 09:31:42 you wrote:
> Hello I'm William Lahti and I'm working on a project using your
> Kimono/Qyoto bindings. I have to say that the bindings are very good,
> quite speedy and stable so far but I'm having one problem: when I
> started the thing I was *really* looking forward to ARGB windows and I
> find that  actually using them with Qyoto is a nightmare. You might
> know that to use ARGB windows on Qt looks like this:
>
> 1. open X display
> 2. find an ARGB visual
> 3. new QApplication (display, argbVisual, argbColormap)
>
> And that seems to be the only way to do it...  well as far as I can
> see neither Qyoto nor Smoke cover this constructor, which makes things
> very painful. Before I knew this I figured I could subclass
> QApplication and call be base "dummy" constructor, then do the Qyoto
> setup steps like Qyoto_init, CreateProxy (), and finally
> interceptor.Invoke() but that seemed to be a lost cause because
> evidently there is only one overload of the QApplication constructor,
> so my differing 'signature' argument was no-op.
>
> I've looked from top to bottom at all the Smoke/Qyoto sources I could
> find at the Kimono site.... but I could not manage to get Smoke to
> generate proxy methods for the X11 constructors (at one point I was
> sure I was supposed to add 'Q_WS_X11' to qtdefines). I tried using new
> (ptr) QApplication() but GDB informed me that the reason it segfaulted
> was that the GC handle IntPtr that it passed was 0x3.... obviously not
> where the data is stored. I found out that libqyoto does the *real*
> allocation... but due to the lack of API exposure this doesn't really
> help me.
>
> Do you have any tips or pointers for me so I could get this going? If
> I manage to get something non-hacky working I'd be glad to send you a
> patch but lack of Smoke/Qyoto documentation hasnt helped. Thanks for
> any time you can give me, and thanks for making these wonderful
> bindings so C# guys like me can get in on the Qt4 fun.
Pleased to hear you're using the Qyoto bindings and they work ok. But is using 
X11 specifics calls is tricky. We really don't want to have platform specific 
things in the Qt dll. Or the various dlls that will map onto the Qt libs 
(QtCore, QtGui etc) in the next release of Qyoto when we split the Smoke lib 
and corresponding ddls up a bit.

On the other hand, QApplication is a partial class and it might be possible to 
add the X11 specific stuff in an extra source that wouldn't be included in 
the standard dll. The symbols in the Smoke library aren't exported, and so I 
don't think you can easily create an instance of 'x_QApplication' in your own 
code, or add extra constructors. 

But instead you should be able to create an ordinary QApplication with an X11 
specific constructor and use that. It will mean that you won't be able to 
override QApplication virtual methods in your C# code, but maybe you don't 
need to do that anyway.

Someone recently wanted to do things with event filters and XEvents from 
QtRuby and use QApplication::x11EventFilter(), but that is also missing from 
the Smoke lib.

I'll cc this mail to the kde-bindings list in case anyone there can discuss 
it.

-- Richard