[svn.haxx.se] · SVN Dev · SVN Users · SVN Org · TSVN Dev · TSVN Users · Subclipse Dev · Subclipse Users · this month's index

Bindings use is *painful*

From: Hyrum K Wright <hyrum_at_hyrumwright.org>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2011 15:08:39 +0000

I'm writing a script in which I simply want to retrieve a set of
arbitrary log message and then do stuff with them. Using the Python
bindings seemed like the logical choice (whether is was or not is now
debatable, but that isn't the point of this mail). Turns out that
using the Python bindings is a *painful* experience, for at least the
following reasons (and they may extend to the other swig-generated
bindings, I don't know):

 * This is little to no documentation. What docs that do exist relate
to the C APIs, and have little bearing on Python types and their
conversions.
 * Because of the above, development with the bindings tends to be by
trial-and-error.
 * The bindings are verbose (client.svn_client_get_log5), and do
little to help the user.
 * They are still very C-like, not using common idioms from the target language.

I don't know how to solve these problems today or tomorrow, and they
may already be old news to many people here. But to a new user of the
bindings, it sure was a frustrating experience (and I already know the
Subversion C infrastructure!) I finally gave up and just used the
commandline, piping the results into my processing script. I feel
sorry for folks trying to use the bindings from scratch.

-Hyrum (who feels better now)
Received on 2011-02-16 16:09:22 CET

This is an archived mail posted to the Subversion Dev mailing list.

This site is subject to the Apache Privacy Policy and the Apache Public Forum Archive Policy.