Shall we label wrappers as optional? [Was Re: Cannot generate eiffel docs after fresh install]

[Paolo Redaelli]

First of all, sorry for my huge latency.... let's answer inline

Il 28/04/24 22:27, Remy.Schleimer ha scritto:

Hi Rapha,

Allow me to express some thoughts:

- currently liberty eiffel distribution has 7k+ classes

We should differentiate... we got
test: 2398 classes
src/lib: 1070 classes
src/smarteiffel: 769 classes
src/staging: 12 classes
src/tools: 232 classes
src/wrappers: 2313 classes

the most interesting is obviously the src/lib cluster; classes are also relevant, but hardly interesting from a documentation point of view.

Staging and tools could be generated separately.

Wrappers... here's sore point and it's my fault. I have been trying to "provide the batteries" that other languages often provides (i.e. Python), so the need of a wrapper, aka bindings.

The low-level wrappers are automatically generated using wrappers-generator, a tool that uses the output of castxml (once known as gcc-xml), that produces an XML description of C/C++ source code and headers. When someone does not have the proper headers installed, the building process fails.

I shall address this ASAP, but I would like to listen to the opinion of you all.

The easier solution and by far the cleanest is to avoid building the wrapper automatically altogether. For example not everyone is interested in Postgresql bindings.

IMHO, the problem is more about definition  of the universe: after a standard install, liberty eiffel just assumes that I want to use all the classes included in the distribution.

This is definitely not the case: On a first trial, I’d be happy to work with the classes included in “my universe”, which in my case was an empty directory.

Should I want to add more classes,  I would be happy to provide a universe to the system (loadpath.se).

    That's wise and I agree. Let's stick to the "default" loadpath, i.e.
    one including only the standard lib.
> But who
>       am I to make such suggestions?

You are the most precious resource of our project, i.e. an active user! Kudos and thanks!