Vala bindings for libappindicator are incorrect

[Maia Everett]

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.

[Krzysztof Klimonda (kklimonda)]

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.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

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.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

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

[Ted Gould (ted)]

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.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

ok, unsbuscribing the reviewers, we should work with upstream to fix gobject-introspection though

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

This was fixed in 0.2.90