[vtk-developers] Improvements to the Python wrapping in VTK

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 1:34 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Marcus D. Hanwell
> <marcus.hanwell at kitware.com> wrote:
>>
>> That sounds great - I will make that move (and agree on reducing
>> moves). My final question if you look at the patch is on the right way
>> to handle vtkType.h and friends - should they just be marked as
>> WRAP_SPECIAL, should we do something different with WRAP_HEADER (which
>> is currently going into the classes file).
>
> I want to export all python-wrappable files, including vtkType.h.  But
> there is no vtkCommonCore-Headers.cmake, so I don't know where to put
> vtkType.h except in vtkCommonCore-Classes.cmake, which is a poor fit.
>
> The main purpose of both WRAP_HEADER and WRAP_SPECIAL is
> just to wrap files in python that don't get wrapped in tcl or java.  The
> WRAP_HEADER is just for wrapping headers that aren't already in the
> class list.  So of course I'd like for WRAP_HEADER headers to be
> exported, but really I'd prefer to export all non-class headers
> anyway.
>
> Since I never extended the "special" wrapping to the java and tcl
> wrappers (and almost certainly won't) maybe a WRAP_PYTHON
> should replace both WRAP_HEADER and WRAP_SPECIAL.
>
I feel like if WRAP_SPECIAL is simply ignored by the other wrapped
languages keeping that name seems reasonable. If we want to extend
either one (or another language in the future) then we can use
WRAP_SPECIAL as an extended set of files that your wrapper must
support and get rid of WRAP_HEADER entirely. It seems to me like they
belong in the -Classes file, but perhaps that name could be a little
more general (-Headers as we only really care about headers for
wrapping?)

Marcus