Questions About the New Schedule

[Simon Edwards]

Hello all,

Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> On Monday 01 October 2007 10:37:06 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
>> On 01.10.07 06:30:25, Dirk Mueller wrote:
>>> On Saturday, 8. September 2007, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
>>>>> 5)  Should language bindings be part of the development platform?
>>>>> Richard Dale says "Python and Ruby in good shape by late October, and
>>>>> possibly C# too."
>>>> If Richard says he can do it, i say we can try it :-)
>>> Thats not enough. somebody has at least to be able to confirm that the
>>> bindings *compile*. right now, kdebindings does not compile, and after I
>>> spent an hour or so looking, I'm sure that it can not compile for anyone
>>> at all, given the fundamental bugs in the build system.
>>>
>>> it is my understanding that Richard uses a completely different build
>>> system to maintain the bindings, at least thats what he used to do in
>>> KDE3 times. There has to be at least somebody who maintains the official
>>> build system, and that person has to be != me.
>> Same thing applies to the python bindings, but those are not buildable
>> with cmake and I don't see why they should be.

> I understand that Simon Edwards is working on making them compile with cmake. 
> Simon, can you give us an update about the python bindings? How stable are 
> they? 

I don't remember telling anyone other than Jim Bublitz that I was 
looking at using cmake to build the bindings. But as a matter of fact, 
yes, yes I have been working on that for the last few days. 8-) (Am I 
that predictable?) Until that is in order, the configure.py script works 
ok. configure.py doesn't really handle installing things other than the 
binding themselves (e.g. example code, docs etc). Which is why I hope to 
be able to switch to cmake sometime as that will make it easier for 
other people to build and install it all, and I'll be able to recycle 
the cmake code which is already used in KDE.

As far as the bindings themselves are concerned, the kdelibs stuff is in 
good shape except for one omission, Phonon. It is tricky module to wrap 
and Jim has been working on it, although we might require additions and 
fixes to SIP (bindings generator, produced and maintained by Phil 
Thompson at Riverbank computing). Jim is still quite confident to still 
have Phonon in KDE 4.0. The other modules in kdelibs are definitely 
complete enough and stable enough for people to develop on.

Other things like docs, example code, test code, and other things which 
you would expect in a SDK, are still being developed and worked on. We 
expect to have it in order by 4.0. This might appear to be a lot of 
development late in the KDE 4 process, but it is unavoidable. We needed 
a relatively stable and workable kdelibs before the real bindings work 
could even start. That said, the bindings themselves are very solid. The 
tools which we are using and building on, SIP and PyQt, have been in 
production for at least 18 months now.

On a technical level, what can I provide in the build system for the 
Python bindings which would simply the tarballing stage of release work? 
(directory layout? a special build target "make dist"??)

cheers,

-- 
Simon Edwards             | KDE-NL, Guidance tools, Guarddog Firewall
simon at simonzone.com       | http://www.simonzone.com/software/
Nijmegen, The Netherlands | "ZooTV? You made the right choice."