[PySide] PySide - Qt5 - Swig

[John Ehresman]

On 1/12/13 5:52 PM, Fabien Castan wrote:
> *The email « PySide is dead ? » has given rise to an interesting
> discussion about the evolution of PySide. The conclusion is that there
> is currently really limited contribution on the project, and shiboken
> seems to be a really big and hard task to maintain.
> *

I know a lot has been written on this thread, but I'd like to go back to
the start since I may have been part of the source of the impression
that it was important to rewrite shiboken.  What I said or meant to say
is that it would be nice to move parts of the code generator to Python
to make it easier to work with, but I did not mean to imply that it's
impossible to work with as it is.  I have gone into the C++ code and
made changes and it's not that different from other code generators I
have worked with.

I'm not enthusiastic about a rewrite using swig; it seems to be a lot of
work for questionable benefits.  I think much of the work with PySide is
writing a Python binding given the specifics of how Qt works so it's
less about using a semi-generic tool such as swiq or shiboken and more
about how Qt object lifetime works.

I have not looked at Qt5 because the application I work on is likely to
use Qt4 for the foreseeable future.  Does anyone on this list know what
has changed and how much work the bindings are likely to need?

PySide does need to transition into more of a community maintained
project because the small group of developers who wrote it initially
have gone on to other things (I think; my apologies if I'm wrong here).
 We do need developers who are comfortable working with C++ just because
Qt is a C++ library, but we also need a more useful bug tracking system
and better documentation.  My approach to helping out has been to do
what I can to figure out how things work, to run code in a C++ debugger
to find and fix bugs, and to contribute changes back.  I think the more
developers who can help out, the better.

Cheers,

John