Add Vala bindings

[Federico Pelloni]

I quickly made a Vala binding to libappindicator, could/should be it added to application-indicator?

[Ted Gould (ted)]

I have no issue adding Vala bindings, in fact I think it's a great idea. But, I'd really like to see them added as part of the build system instead of a "one shot" type of thing. I don't know the Vala parts, but I'd be happy to answer questions on the build system parts.

[Neil J. Patel (njpatel)]

The issue is that Vala needs the libraries installed to generate docs, at least that's what I gather from reading the binding tools man page. So it doesn't work well as part of the build the way they are currently generated.

[Federico Pelloni (fredp)]

That's true, at least as far as I know.

To generate the bindings I created the two required files (.files and .namespace), then used the commands vala-gen-introspection and vapigen, the first one looking for the installed .pc pkgconfig file.
Also, then I had to fix something by hand in the generated .vapi file because sometimes the extraction engine gets lost within namespace, class and function names. (e.g. the AppIndicator class had no name)

So I don't think it's possible to automatically generate 100%-working bindings.
(anyway we won't need this anymore once gobject introspection is working, they say)

[Ted Gould (ted)]

Okay. I'm not sure that I understand, but I'll believe you guys :)

My question then is, how do we know when we've broken the bindings? Is
there some way we can check as part of distcheck so we don't ship
something not working?

[Neil J. Patel (njpatel)]

For our stuff, we only re-generate the bindings when we've made an API change, but that's because we're developing with them. Normally I'd re-generate as part of the release process, or once you have a stable API.

For the bootstrapping needed, see liblauncher vapi/ directory in src.

[Gabe Gorelick (gabegorelick)]

The liblauncher stuff is actually in the gobject-introspection branch for anyone who's curious, I know I was trying to find it for a while. http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~liblauncher-team/liblauncher/gobject-introspection/files/head%3A/vapi/.