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On 05/06/11 14:25, Gilles Dartiguelongue wrote:
> Le vendredi 06 mai 2011 à 10:40 +0200, Marijn a écrit :
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>> Dear all,
>>
>> I was just looking into the meaning of the introspection use-flag and
>> there are many ebuilds that use it so perhaps it should be globalized,
>> which would also give us a chance to improve the naming/description.
>> Current descriptions are:
>>
>> Use dev-libs/gobject-introspection for introspection
>> Enable GObject introspection.
>>
>> Currently it is hard to tell which functionality is enabled through this
>> flag and the meaning of the descriptions for when the flag is off are
>> even more unclear. Does it mean that introspection will not be used or
>> will some other way of introspection be used? Either way, perhaps the
>> people in the know could shed some light on this issue?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Marijn
> 
> See original thread on this mailing list:
> 
> From: 		Arun Raghavan <ford_prefect@g.o>
> Subject: 	[gentoo-dev] New global USE flag: introspection
> Date: 		Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:12:58 +0530 (20/06/2010 16:42:58)
> Message-ID:
> <AANLkTimjJIGW6k5vQCX-wryeYy_FPUTQpRN7jmW4xRKN@...>
> 

Thanks for the pointer![1] Having just read that discussion it seems
that even back then many developers found that the name "introspection"
is too broad/imprecise. Several alternatives were proposed, like
gintrospection, gobject-introspection, gir, api-introspection. I think
any of these would have been better than the current name.

And what happened to the proposed description:

introspection: Add gobject-introspection support, allowing for the
dynamic generation of bindings for various languages

which at least contains a hint of what the purpose is of this flag? But
maybe someone can do even better than that now that this technology has
been in use for a while?

Marijn

[1]:http://marc.info/?l=gentoo-dev&m=127704501818312&w=2
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