[java-gnome-hackers] Rewrite of Code generator using GIR

[Serkan K. <se...@ge...>]

Currently we're using defs file from pygobject which is generated by
h2def, and manually adding new symbols along the way. We also generate
or handcraft some defs files ourselves and add them into the tree. And
the code generator parses them to generate user invisible class files
and JNI code. This causes out-of-date symbol metadata since the work
is done manually.

For a bit of time GNOME project is prividing a package called Gobject
introspection, which basically holds interface definitions of GObject
based libraries. They're still generated from scanning source code,
but done by the library providers themselves and kept up-to-date.
GNOME also provides a central GIR metadata in "gir-repository" package
for libraries that don't provide them (eventually libraries end up
supporting GIR)

I started rewrite of parser part of the code generator using .gir XML
files (parsing them was easier otherwise we would need to write JNI
code for GIRepository). The branch is at
bzr://research.operationaldynamics.com/bzr/java-gnome/hackers/serkan/introspection/
Please pull and investigate it because this branch is changing a core
part of Java-Gnome

Future considerations
* How to handle manualy fixes we do for .defs files
* How to provide unexisting GIR files (we may use the scanner to
generate them and get them included in "gir-repository")

Regards,
Serkan KABA