>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Berlin <dberlin@dberlin.org> writes:
>> Expecting people to read cryptic .h files AND even more cryptic
>> SWIG files is really not very nice at all.
Daniel> See, this is where i disagree. Expecting people to read well
Daniel> documented .h files to discover what the interface for
Daniel> something is, IMHO, is perfectly fine.
Daniel> Expecting people to understand that in order to wrap this API
Daniel> into certain languages, some mechcanical transformations were
Daniel> performed to it, is also okay.
Daniel> You are acting like this is a huge secret deal where every
Daniel> single function has had something different done to it, and
Daniel> it's just not so.
I think part of the reason I feel that way is that there is not the
slightest hint of ANY description anywhere that I can find to get a
person started in this direction.
Personally, I don't find that "read the source" is reasonable
documentation, but I guess opinions differ. And I suppose SWIG is a
mechanical transformation.
But how was I supposed to know that? It isn't stated anywhere! There
is a faint tantalizing hint of conventional documentation (actual
descriptive text) in the book, which implies that one would expect to
see more of that, but there isn't any more. How about a FAQ entry
to tell people "the C API is documented in the .h files; for other
languages, read the SWIG documentation and the SWIG wrapper files to
learn how the C API is transformed to those other languages". Then at
least people would have a place to start.
Daniel> I've written very complex applications using the SWIG API,
Daniel> that use parts of SVN i was never familiar with at all (IE
Daniel> the fact that i am an svn developer didn't help me), and it
Daniel> just wasn't that big a problem.
Hm. Well, part of the trouble I have is that I was trying to do
something quite simple, which I could have done in a shell script in
15 minutes (but not robust enough to my taste). And it took several
hours of Brownian motion, doing random experiments that lead nowhere.
I just don't find this acceptable... sorry.
paul
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Received on Mon Mar 13 02:02:38 2006