APT and SWIG

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

I don't know if anyone has attempted this before (and the list archive search
function seems to be broken), but I've done some work on getting SWIG to build
scripting language wrappers for libapt-pkg.

I know that some work has been done on perl-apt and python-apt, but I hope that
if this project works out, both of these (and more) will be able to be
generated from common source, which will hopefully be automatically generated
from the APT headers.

Currently, SWIG can't parse APT's header files as they are, due to its
incomplete C++ support.  The changes are too extensive for it to be practical
to wrap them in #ifdef SWIG, so the SWIG interface files have to be maintained
separately.  However, I hope to minimize maintenance by automating merging of
the changes where possible.  As SWIG's C++ support improves, hopefully the
modifications will get down to a few lines and be able to be merged into the
headers themselves.

Currently, I've gotten things to the point where both of the attached
scripts run and produce the following (correct) output:

libapt-pkg version: 3.2.0
DPkg::Build-Options: -b -uc -rfakeroot
A package:  mpg123-alsa

Much more of the functionality should work, now that I finally got SWIG to
digest the stuff, but I haven't done any further testing yet.

Before I put any more time into this, do you folks think that this would
be something useful?

-- 
 - mdz

Attachment: test.pl
Description: Perl program

#!/usr/bin/python

import apt_pkg

print "libapt-pkg version: %s.%s.%s" % (apt_pkg.APT_PKG_MAJOR, apt_pkg.APT_PKG_MINOR, apt_pkg.APT_PKG_RELEASE)

apt_pkg.pkgInitConfig(apt_pkg._config)
apt_pkg.pkgInitSystem(apt_pkg._config)

print "DPkg::Build-Options: %s" % apt_pkg._config.Find("DPkg::Build-Options")

file = apt_pkg._config.FindFile("Dir::Cache::pkgcache");
print "pkgcache: ", file
mmap = apt_pkg.MMap(apt_pkg.FileFd(file, apt_pkg.FileFd.ReadOnly),
                    apt_pkg.MMap.Public|apt_pkg.MMap.ReadOnly)

pkgcache = apt_pkg.pkgCache(mmap)

pkgiterator = pkgcache.PkgBegin()
print "A package: ", pkgiterator.Name()

Attachment: pgpNQe58D4Nvr.pgp
Description: PGP signature