Re: gobject-introspection typelibs and shared libraries

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org> skribis:

> On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 10:22 AM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Yes, I see in the diagram on the page above that libraries are actually
>> dlopened, with the name that appears in the typelib file.
>>
>> Thus the patch you proposed is the right thing, I think.  Before
>> committing, could you add a comment a the top of the file explaining
>> that the file names contained in typelib files are meant to be dlopen’d,
>> hence this patch?  Also please credit the original author of the patch.
>
> Actually, I see that this part of gobject-introspection was slightly
> edited from our version 1.38.0 to later ones. Nix uses 1.40.0 and the
> newest is 1.42.0. So I'm planning to upgrade to the latest.

Good.

>>> Do we also need to do something for GI_TYPELIB_PATH?  Perhaps this
>>> should be in the ‘native-search-paths’ field of gobject-introspection?
>>
>> I think that we do not need to set GI_TYPELIB_PATH in
>> gobject-introspection, but in in the packages making use of it.
>
> I've run the tests with and without
>
>     (native-search-paths
>      (list (search-path-specification
>             (variable "GI_TYPELIB_PATH")
>             (directories '("lib/girepository-1.0")))))
>     (search-paths native-search-paths)

You added these fields to ‘gobject-introspection’ itself, right?  That’s
where it belongs.

> (and with/without (search-path ...), but it makes no difference.  This
> probably due to the fact that there is no lib/girepository-1.0
> directory in the source tree and the tests are run before
> installation.

This will only make a difference when building packages that depend on
gobject-introspection, and that also depend on packages having a
lib/girepository-1.0 sub-directory.

(Compare to how CPATH is handled for GCC.)

> I therefore think that this is not needed here.  It will be needed
> with packages making use of gobject-introspection or other libraries
> providing typelib files.

Exactly.  So it’s better to push a patch that adds it right after the
patch that fixes g-ir-scanner.

Thanks,
Ludo’.