[sugar] pygtk's ".defs" files, and wrapping interfaces for python extensions

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Mon, 2007-03-05 at 02:45 -0800, Don Hopkins wrote:
> Very interesting -- I'll read more about the pygtk codegen stuff.
> Thanks for the pointers! 
> 
> I tried to make my own project by copying the pycairo directory and
> using it as a template, but that has hand-written Python interfaces
> instead of using pygtk codegen, and the gnu automake configuration
> stuff is being difficult and making my brain hurt. 
> 
> I took a look at the hippo canvas stuff, and it looks very nifty, and
> I think that might be a good way to integrate the Poppler PDF library
> with Cairo. 
> 
> I think I could just make a canvas object like the hippo image object,
> that reads from PDF files instead, and calls Poppler to render into
> the Cairo context. 
> Maybe I could just add it to the hippo project without making my own
> project, and use the canvas image object as an example of how to wrap
> the interface. 
> Hippo canvas uses the pygtk codegen to generate the interfaces, so
> that's a point in its favor. 
> 
> Is the hippo canvas code set up to be extend with separate projects,
> or is it easiest to just add new canvas components to the hippo
> project itself? 
> I guess it would be easier for me to just add some new stuff to an
> existing project, that way I could avoid messing with the
> configuration stuff. 

I love the idea to integrate this with hippo, though I think it would be
better to keep the poppler bindings as a separate project and have
HippoPDF depend on this. Not trivial auto* magics would be necessary to
keep it inside hippo anyway, because we can't enable it unconditionally
(mugshot can't depend on it).

I can hack a basic poppler-python package for you with the build stuff
later tonight (or at worst tomorrow morning). We could use a git repo on
dev.laptop.org for it...

Marco