[Libguestfs] [PATCH 15/16] gobject: Improve the structure of guestfs-sections.txt

[Matthew Booth]

On 03/27/2012 04:20 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 04:00:57PM +0100, Matthew Booth wrote:
>> The generator doesn't make a very good job of guestfs-sections.txt. This change
>> manually fixes its title, and moves various sections which shouldn't be in the
>> documentation into a Private subsection.
>>
>> This change requires removing the --rebuild-sections command line option from
>> gtkdoc-scan. This means that any future apis will have to be manually added to
>> guestfs-sections.txt if they are to appear in the gtk-doc output.
>
> Sorry, but no.  I took a strong stance against *any* manually hackery
> and over time that stance has proven to be a good one.  Imagine we'd
> done this with other bindings -- that would by now have negated all
> the good work we did with the generator.
>
> Please explain why the generator cannot get this right, but a human can.
> Is there some missing information we need in the generator?

Firstly, 'generator' in this context is the gtk-doc generator, not the 
libguestfs generator. The fundamental issue seems to be that it doesn't 
correctly handle more than 1 class per source file. This patch is, 
frankly, a fudge. However, it makes the output somewhat bearable. The 
correct fix for this is to split guestfs-gobject.c into multiple source 
files. This is certainly possible, but a load of donkey work I wanted to 
leave for another day.

The manual hackery required here is not onerous, and the build system 
makes it extremely simple to both notice and fix. I deleted 3 entries 
from guestfs-sections.txt at random and ran make in gobject/docs. The 
output was:

   DOC   Scanning header files
   DOC   Introspecting gobjects
   DOC   Rebuilding template files
./guestfs-unused.txt:1: warning: 3 unused declarations.They should be 
added to guestfs-sections.txt in the appropriate place.
   DOC   Building XML
./guestfs-unused.txt:1: warning: 3 unused declarations.They should be 
added to guestfs-sections.txt in the appropriate place.
   DOC   Building HTML

The contents of guestfs-unused.txt is:
guestfs_session_equal
guestfs_session_get_pid
guestfs_session_inotify_close

which are the 3 apis I deleted. All that's required to fix this is to 
copy those 3 entries into the api list in guestfs-sections.txt.

So I agree it's not ideal, but its a not-too-onerous, pragmatic, 
temporary workaround.

Matt
-- 
Matthew Booth, RHCA, RHCSS
Red Hat Engineering, Virtualisation Team

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