xcffib is intended to be a (mostly) drop-in replacement for xpyb, the original python binding for xcb.
For most end users of software that depends on xcffib or developers writing
code against xcffib, you can use the version of xcffib on pypi. To install it,
you'll need libxcb's headers and libxcb-render's headers (these are available
via sudo apt-get install libxcb-render0-dev on Ubuntu). Once you have the C
headers installed, you can just pip install xcffib.
If you're interested in doing development, read on...
You should be able to install all the language deps from hackage or pip. .github/workflows/ci.yaml has an example of how to install the dependencies on Ubuntu flavors.
See the Makefile for
examples on how to run the tests. Your contribution should at pass make check
before it can be merged. The newtests make target can be used to regenerate
expected haskell test data if the tests are failing because you made a change
to the generated python code.
Sometimes (more often recently), xcbproto makes some updates that we need to
do some work for. These often require some updates to xcb-types as well.
First, hack your changes into xcb-types and cabal install them, then git
clone the version of xcbproto you want to somewhere, e.g. ~/packages:
~/packages $ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/xcbproto.git
Finally, you can build/test xcffib against this custom version of
xcb-{proto|types} with:
make XCBDIR=~/packages/xcbproto/src check
To go along with new xcbproto elements, sometimes you need to hack on newer versions of xcb-types. Newer cabals require you to do something like:
echo packages: ../xcb-types/xcb-types.cabal ./xcffib.cabal > cabal.project
In order to find locally modified versions of xcb-types.
In general, you should s/xcb/xcffib/g. Explicit differences are listed below,
however I don't think these will prevent any porting, because these were either
not public APIs, or not actually generated (in the case of the exceptions) by
xpyb. I think most porting should Just Work via the regex above.
xcb.Exceptionis spelledxcffib.XcffibExceptionand is also a parent of all exceptions generated by xcffib.xcb.ConnectExceptionis gone, it was unusedxcffib.ConnectionExceptionis raised on connection errorsxcb.Iteratoris gone; similar functionality is implemented byxcffib.pack_list.xcb.Requestis gone. It was an entirely internal and unnecessary interface.xcffib.Connection.send_requesttakes slightly different (but more sensible) arguments.- Everywhere
xcbprotosayschar,xcffibuses a char. That means on input for a<list type="char"/>, you can use a python string literal.xcffibalso gives you a string of length 1 out for each element in such a list, instead of anint. Finally, there is a helper method calledto_stringonxcffib.List, to convert these string-like things into native strings. This means that for things likexproto.STR, you can just dothe_str.name.to_string()instead of''.join(map(chr, the_str.name)). - As above,
voidis also packed/unpacked aschars, since the convention is to use it as string data, e.g. inxproto.ChangeProperty. - The submodule
xcbis gone. The top module re-exported all these constants anyway, so they live there now. i.e.xcb.xcb.CurrentTimeis now justxcffib.CurrentTime.
-
When sending requests with nested structs you no longer have to pack the contents yourself. For example, when calling
xproto.FillPoly, you used to have to convert thePOINTs you were passing in to some sort of buffer which had themstruct.pack'd. Now, you can just pass an iterable (orxcffib.List) ofPOINTs and it will be automatically packed for you. -
Most of the lower level XCB connection primitives that were previously not exposed are now available via
xcffib.{ffi,C}, assuming you want to go out of band of the binding. -
Checked vs. Unchecked requests are still supported (via Checked and Unchecked function calls). However, there is also an additional optional parameter
is_checkedto each request function, to allow you to set the checked status that way. Additionally, requests that are (un)checked by default, e.g.QueryTree(CreateWindow), have aQueryTreeChecked(CreateWindowUnchecked) version which just has the same default behavior. -
The
FooErrorBadFooduality is gone; it was difficult to understand what to actually catch if you wanted to handle an error. Instead,FooErrorandBadFooare aliases, and both implement the X error object description and python Exception (via inheriting fromXcffibException). -
You can now create synthetic events. This makes it much easier to work with
ClientMessageEvents. For example:e = xcffib.xproto.ClientMessageEvent.synthetic(format=..., window=..., ...) conn.core.SendEvent(..., e.pack())
Why is the binding generator written in haskell? Because haskell is awesome.
- xprint and xkb support. These will require some non-trivial work in xcb-types, since it won't parse them correctly.
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