Remove gee dependency and replace it with GLib native types

[Timothy]

Gee is highly Vala specific and causes issues with GObject introspection to be used e.g. by gjs or python. Hence dependency on Gee should be completely removed.

Original description:

Gee collections shouldn't really be returned from publicly visible API. Other languages (notable Gjs) have trouble with Gee do to its heavy use of generics. The solution would be to return the Gee collection wrapped in a class with a hardcoded type.

Something like

public class ClipboardItemList {
  private List<IClipboardItem> list;

  public ClipboardItemList(List<IClipboardItem> list) {
    this.list = list;
  }

  public IClipboardItem get (int i) {
    return this.list[i];
  }

  ...

}

Is this something we want to address?

[Timothy (redhatter271-deactivatedaccount)]

Another simpler options would be to call 'to_array()' on the collection before returning it.

[Oliver Sauder (sao)]

Gee is not heavily used within Diodon and is highly Vala specific.

I would actually like to remove the Gee dependency altogether and use GLib native types like GLib.List
<https://valadoc.org/glib-2.0/GLib.List.html>.

Would this work with gjs?

[Timothy (redhatter271-deactivatedaccount)]

It would. GLib.List is seamlessly transformed into an array.

[Oliver Sauder (sao)]

Then let's try to move to GLib.List that seems to be the cleanest way.

[Timothy (redhatter271-deactivatedaccount)]

I went ahead and made the changes. I needed most of them to get the GNOME Shell indicator working anyway.

[Oliver Sauder (sao)]

Great thanks. Patch looks good. Applied and pushed.