xffm, libraries and 'interface'

[Maarten Boekhold]

> Do you need a list of all symbols exported from the executable to normal
> libraries or to module type libraries? 

Both...

> Also, do you need a list of symbols exported from normal libraries to
> modules? And from normal libraries to each other? 

Hmmm, from libraries to modules perhaps not, as we could link the 
modules against the libraries. But from normal libraries to each other, 
perhaps. I suppose it depends on the link order. If we have library A 
that references B, and B references A, then there's a circular reference 
that you can't resolve with a specific link order. In that case I 
suppose we need those symbols in an IMPORTS file.

I haven't yet come across such a situation, so I'm not sure what the 
syntax of such an IMPORTS file should be, i.e. I'm not sure if:

IMPORTS
the_symbol = thelib.dll.the_symbol

will work. This will require a bit of testing.

> I suspect you will need all.
> 
> If that is the case, I can change all "extern" statements to 
> G_MODULE_IMPORT, and then write a perl parser to create an IMPORTS file
> (this will make maintainance easier since symbols are moved around at
> times).

I did something similar with the panel, except I created a shell script 
that works on G_MODULE_EXPORT (i.e. not G_MODULE_IMPORT). Actually, I 
couldnt' work out how to directly extract that from the source, so I 
added comments /* EXPORT:symbol */ to the panel source code...

> Using "G_MODULE_EXPORT" for all exported symbols would be no problem
> (AFAIK, in Linux it gets expanded to nothing). In fact, it would make
> the G_MODULE_IMPORT scheme described above a bit clearer. Would using
> G_MODULE_EXPORT in front of the symbol definitions work instead of
> DLLEXPORT?

G_MODULE_EXPORT works fine. G_MODULE_EXPORT expands to the same thing as 
DLLEXPORT (in fact I copied this from the gmodule.h file...)

G_MODULE_IMPORT would look more correct, but it expands to 'extern' on 
just about every platform I know about, so if you really want, you can 
keep the 'extern' declaration.

Did I understand from one of your previous mails that you are in the 
process of converting lots of these 'normal libraries' to 'modules'? 
I.e. move them from ../libs to ../modules?

Jasper mentioned that he was planning on converting the panel (and 
other) plugin interfaces to use GtkPlug/GtkSocket. I don't know (yet) 
what that actually is, but if you are reorganizing the modules/libraries 
  handling for xffm, it might make sense to have a look at this as well, 
to come up with a consistent model across xfce. This would be for 4.4 or 
later of course... I was planning to start looking at this as well, see 
if I can help jasper out with this.

Maarten