[PySide] Proposal for "Visual tool to fast edit type system files" -- a Pyside idea

[anatoly techtonik]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 6:24 PM, higery <shoulderhigher at gmail.com> wrote:
> The following is my GSOC2012 proposal although in a very preliminary way, I
> will
> appreciate anyone can make some suggestions about this proposal.
>
>
>
> Proposal for "Visual tool to fast edit type system files"
>
>
> Abstract
> -----------------
> Typesystem file is an important XML file used by API Extractor of Pyside to
> save information of how the API should be exported to the chosen target
> language.
> To support different kinds of complex target languages, Pyside typesystem
> file
> must support many simple or complicated meta information, thus it's a little
> difficult for developers to edit these pure typesystem files, so it's very
> significant
> to write a visual tool to fast edit typesystem files. We can develop an
> Eclipse plugin
> to fast implement such kind tool.

If it will be a visual tool for PySide, it should be in Python/Qt. So
I would investigate which Python/Qt components/widgets will allow to
build such tool in non-Eclipse environment. Then provide a detailed
list of features that this tool should provide:

1. List of exportable symbols from the given C/C++ lib
2. Wrapper suggestions for exportable symbols
  2.1 Propose several ways to wrap exportable
  2.2 Make heuristics pluggable/extendible in Python
3. Compare list of exportable symbols with current schema
  3.1 Investigate possibility of tree compare if imported lib contains
nested structures
4. Detect wrapper errors and security issues
  4.1 Make heuristics pluggable/extendible
5. Provide report to summarize export completeness, e.g.:
    "Exported: XX  Converted: YY  Skipped: ZZ Unhandled: .."

These can be implemented as a separate widgets or as an addition to
some IDE like Spyder. It is also possible to improve Spyder plugin
system on the way. That's my own wishes.

> Week 11: support inject-documentation,modify-documentation
> Week 12-13: enhance this tool, submit source code, write documentations, and
> so on.

In the perfect word source code, documentation and test are delivered weekly. =)

-- 
anatoly t.