While the work on NULL-terminated array types make it much easier in C,
bindings don't have enough information to create native array/list types
in some generic functions such as g_object_get|set(), or else we just
don't know the right annotations to use for this to be possible. This is
report gobject-introspection#492.
So for the time being, we are creating dedicated functions for GeglColor
arrays and for other core object arrays (arrays of images, items, etc.).
E.g. in Python, while you can set a single GimpImage like this:
> config.set_property('image', image)
… you need to set a list of images like this:
> config.set_core_object_array('images', [image1, image2])
… accessed from Python.
Creating a new function gimp_value_array_get_color_array(). This should normally
not be needed (it isn't in C), but because of GObject Introspection limitation
and the fact that pygobject will automatically try to convert GValue to the
embedded value, we get this weird situation where the result is unusable in
Python for certain types. One of these types is GimpColorArray.
I suggest an annotation request to GObject Introspection:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gobject-introspection/-/issues/492
I think that with such annotation, followed as a second step by pygobject
support, correctly handling NULL terminated C arrays generically should be
feasible by bindings.
Plug-ins that work from different bindings probably want to use their
own list-type to specify arguments, rather than working with a more
cumbersome `GimpValueArray`.
This new API should make it less verbose. For example:
```
args = Gimp.ValueArray.new(5)
args.insert(0, GObject.Value(Gimp.RunMode, Gimp.RunMode.NONINTERACTIVE))
args.insert(1, GObject.Value(Gimp.Image, image))
args.insert(2, GObject.Value(Gimp.Drawable, mask))
args.insert(3, GObject.Value(GObject.TYPE_INT, int(time.time())))
args.insert(4, GObject.Value(GObject.TYPE_DOUBLE, turbulence))
Gimp.get_pdb().run_procedure('plug-in-plasma', args)
```
becomes
```
Gimp.get_pdb().run_procedure('plug-in-plasma', [
GObject.Value(Gimp.RunMode, Gimp.RunMode.NONINTERACTIVE),
GObject.Value(Gimp.Image, image),
GObject.Value(Gimp.Drawable, mask),
GObject.Value(GObject.TYPE_INT, int(time.time())),
GObject.Value(GObject.TYPE_DOUBLE, turbulence),
])
```
So a value array can now we created like this:
array = gimp_value_array_new_from_types (&error_msg,
G_TYPE_STRING, "foo",
G_TYPE_INT, 23,
G_TYPE_NONE);
Change PDB generation to use this, which makes for much nicer code in
the libgimp wrappers, and only set arrays separately instead of all
values.
and _new_from_types_valist()
which take a va_list of GTypes and creates a GimpValueArray
initialized with these types, so one can simply have a list of
g_value_set_foo (gimp_value_array_index (array, i), foo);
in the next lines. I'm not so sure this is the best API ever...
because it confuses gtk-doc and breaks some links. Also change the
"Index of new symbols in GIMP 2.x" sections to be what seems to be the
modern standard (looked at the GLib and GTK+ docs), and update some
other stuff.
