[Telepathy] Proposal for changes on tp-qt4

[Andre Moreira Magalhaes]

Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 at 12:37:38 +0000, Andre Moreira Magalhaes wrote:
>   
>> - Move all client code from TelepathyQt4 to TelepathyQt4/Client, this 
>> includes moving all cli-*.* files to the Client subdir and renaming 
>> them, removing the cli- prefix.
>>     
>
> I agree, but this is a disruptive change, so we should do it when there are
> fewer outstanding branches (in particular, Olli's "handles" branch
> and my "cm" branch should go in first).
>
> Olli wanted to reserve Client/ for the stub headers and put all real
> code in some other subdirectory; I'm not clear why this is. Olli, can you
> explain?
>   
I would stick with the Client dir for the code itself, so we don't have 
code splitted in different directories. Oli??
>> - In the code generation process we are creating source files in a 
>> directory called TelepathyQt4/_gen that will be installed. As these 
>> files may and probably will be used by applications, I suggest not 
>> putting this files in the _gen dir, instead we should put them in the 
>> same dir as the helper classes but with a different nomenclature. For 
>> example the generated files for connection-manager.xml would go to 
>> TelepathyQt4/Client/connection-manager-interface.* not conflicting with 
>> the helper class called TelepathyQt4/Client/connection-manager-*. So all 
>> generated files would have a suffix -interface.*.
>>     
>
> The reason the _gen directory has such an ugly name is to remind library
> users that they should never be #include'd directly. I don't consider the
> presence and exact naming of these header files to be API; consider them
> to be an implementation detail of the code generation process.
>
> In telepathy-glib the headers in _gen are not even self-contained - you
> have to #include some more stuff to make them work. The non-generated
> headers like <telepathy-glib/channel.h> take care of doing that, so
> these are the only ones that library users should #include.
> (Is it conventional in Qt to consider the "lower-case" headers not to be
> part of the API either?)
>   
There is no such convention, but we usually include the camel case headers.

>> - As the generated files will also be exported I suggest creating header 
>> files for them the same way we do for the helper classes. Example: 
>> TelepathyQt4/Client/connection-manager-interface.h would have a 
>> corresponding TelepathyQt4/Client/ConnectionManagerInterface.
>>     
>
> We could do that, but IMO
> <TelepathyQt4/Client/ConnectionManagerInterface> should #include
> <TelepathyQt4/cli-connection-manager.h> (or whatever we rename it to) rather
> than directly including the generated header; the generated headers
> aren't guaranteed to be self-contained.
>   
Ah good, just to make it clear, so we should have a cli-*.h for each 
generated interface we have, even if there is no implementation of it, 
so users don't include the generated header directly?

BR
Andrunko