Ubuntu
indicator-application package

Vala bindings for libappindicator are incorrect

Bug #632996 reported by Maia Everett on 2010-09-08

This bug affects 8 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Application Indicators	Fix Released	Medium	Unassigned
	indicator-application (Ubuntu)	Fix Released	Low	Ted Gould

Bug Description

Binary package hint: indicator-application

There are several issues:
1. Private fields are exposed.
2. The C prefix for AppIndicator is set incorrectly, resulting in the generated C file failing to compile because it expects the prefix to be app_indicator_app_indicator_*.
3. Some properties are not marked as being accessed directly, while the icon_name property is not bound to the existing getter/setter. The Vala compiler expects there to be _get_icon_name and _set_icon_name by default.

I'm attaching a patch for the generated .vapi file - I tweaked it for a personal project. You'll have to modify the C source, presumably.

Tags:

Revision history for this message

Maia Everett (linneris) wrote on 2010-09-08:

AppIndicator-0.1.vapi.diff Edit (4.8 KiB, text/plain)

Revision history for this message

Krzysztof Klimonda (kklimonda) wrote on 2010-09-08:

It's a direct result of libindicator not following GObject naming conventions and various oddities in the API itself - because of that GObject Introspection creates bogus .gir (and probably .typelib) and vapigen creates wrong bindings. To fix that we would have to rewrite big parts of API or wait for vapigen to support .metadata for .gir files - not even sure if that's in plans, by definition gir should provide all the data needed for languages to create their own bindings.

Changed in indicator-application (Ubuntu):
importance:	Undecided → Low
status:	New → Triaged

Sebastien Bacher (seb128) on 2010-09-08

Changed in indicator-application (Ubuntu):
assignee:	nobody → Ted Gould (ted)

Brian Murray (brian-murray) on 2010-09-08

tags:

added: patch

Revision history for this message

Ted Gould (ted) wrote on 2010-09-10:

I played with this some more to see if we can trick the GIR files to handle it correctly. What is needed is for the GIR file to have a NULL namespace. This works, at some level, but the tools start to error out with it. I think that the upstream tools will have to be fixed to make this work correctly.

Revision history for this message

Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote on 2010-09-29:

Ted, should the patch be removed from the review list then or is it still useful?

Revision history for this message

Ted Gould (ted) wrote on 2010-09-29: Re: [Bug 632996] Re: Vala bindings for libappindicator are incorrect

On Wed, 2010-09-29 at 09:50 +0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> Ted, should the patch be removed from the review list then or is it
> still useful?

Yeah, I think so. The problem with the patch is that it breaks the Vala
API but doesn't fix it entirely. It seems that if we're going to break
everyone it should be once, to the right situation. To do that we're
going to need to fix the gobject-introspection parser, which I think we
should do for Natty. I'll subscribe this bug to the list of proposed
things we need to fix for Natty.