[vtk-developers] Improvements to the Python wrapping in VTK

[David Gobbi]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 11:37 AM, Marcus D. Hanwell
<marcus.hanwell at kitware.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 1:34 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Marcus D. Hanwell
>> <marcus.hanwell at kitware.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> That sounds great - I will make that move (and agree on reducing
>>> moves). My final question if you look at the patch is on the right way
>>> to handle vtkType.h and friends - should they just be marked as
>>> WRAP_SPECIAL, should we do something different with WRAP_HEADER (which
>>> is currently going into the classes file).
>>
>> I want to export all python-wrappable files, including vtkType.h.  But
>> there is no vtkCommonCore-Headers.cmake, so I don't know where to put
>> vtkType.h except in vtkCommonCore-Classes.cmake, which is a poor fit.
>>
>> The main purpose of both WRAP_HEADER and WRAP_SPECIAL is
>> just to wrap files in python that don't get wrapped in tcl or java.  The
>> WRAP_HEADER is just for wrapping headers that aren't already in the
>> class list.  So of course I'd like for WRAP_HEADER headers to be
>> exported, but really I'd prefer to export all non-class headers
>> anyway.
>>
>> Since I never extended the "special" wrapping to the java and tcl
>> wrappers (and almost certainly won't) maybe a WRAP_PYTHON
>> should replace both WRAP_HEADER and WRAP_SPECIAL.
>>
> I feel like if WRAP_SPECIAL is simply ignored by the other wrapped
> languages keeping that name seems reasonable. If we want to extend
> either one (or another language in the future) then we can use
> WRAP_SPECIAL as an extended set of files that your wrapper must
> support and get rid of WRAP_HEADER entirely. It seems to me like they
> belong in the -Classes file, but perhaps that name could be a little
> more general (-Headers as we only really care about headers for
> wrapping?)

I'd also prefer -Headers over -Classes.  A complete list of
every header file that is part of the install, along with a list
of properties.

 - David