[PyKDE] SIP Roadmap

[Phil Thompson]

On Friday 03 January 2003 11:46 am, gvermeul at grenoble.cnrs.fr wrote:
> > For those interested I've added a SIP Roadmap to the website at
> > http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/sip/roadmap.php which describes the
> > main objectives and features for SIP v4.
> >
> > Comments welcome.
>
> As author of PyQwt, an extension package that I support also on Qt-230-NC,
> I have the following comments:
>
> (1) wrt the obeying to the Python API export rules. This also facilitates
> the link step on other platforms than MacOS/X: under current scheme this is
> a minor problem on Posix systems, but on Windows, it means rebuilding
> PyQt-NC and sip-NC to rebuild the necessary *.exp and *.lib. Great!

I hadn't appreciated that. I'll try and remember to include a sub-package, 
excluded from the "Typical" installation, that includes the .exp and .lib 
files. Remind me when I forget.

> (2) wrt to the limitation to Qt >= 3.0.0. This will make it more difficult
> for me to keep PyQwt compatible with Windows (I have no commercial version
> for Qt, neither for PyQt). Let me point out that I know of at least 2
> companies with a commercial license for PyQt that are also using PyQwt.

Actually the real problem is that (1) requires qmake rather than tmake. I 
don't think there will be an issue with Qt itself.

> From a more general point of view:
>
> (3) Using the new-style Python-2.2 classes allows to map a C++ inheritance
> tree to Python (I have played with this, writing a wrapper for Fltk by
> hand).
> This is a great step forward for sip, also as a wrapper tool for other
> libraries than Qt. In this respect, it would be nice if there is
> support for two Python sip extensions modules, "sipQt" and "sip", with
> and without Qt support.

How would that help? If you use a non-Qt wrapper with a Qt-sip module, it will 
work fine. If you try a Qt wrapper with a non-Qt-sip module you will get an 
exception.

> In summary, sounds great, but I'd like to keep support for Qt >= 2.3.0.

As I said, it comes down to tmake/qmake. tmake doesn't support plugins which 
is what a pure Python module is - but maybe that won't be an issue for 
Windows and UNIX. It will be worth playing with once snapshots of SIP v4 
appear.

Phil