introspection for C modules

I can't really ever imagine working on this myself, sad to say.

I'd be interested in having a look at this - subvertpy and samba both need it -, would you be able to discuss this some time ?

discuss as-in a pre-implementation call of some sort, I'm a bit clueless as to where to start and what the best way is to add this kind of support into pydoctor.

On Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:13:17 -0000, Jelmer Vernooij <email address hidden> wrote:
> discuss as-in a pre-implementation call of some sort, I'm a bit clueless
> as to where to start and what the best way is to add this kind of
> support into pydoctor.

Well, basically, for a C module I guess you want to insert a
pydoctor.model.Module object that describes the module you're
introspecting... here's a start, perhaps?

    lp:~mwhudson/pydoctor/introspect-c-modules

See if that makes any sense :-) You need to run like this:

 .../introspect-c-modules/bin/pydoctor \
 ~/canonical/repos/subvertpy/trunk/subvertpy --introspect \
 subvertpy.client --introspect subvertpy.repos --introspect subvertpy.wc \
 --html-output subvertpy-doc

from somewhere you can import subvertpy.client etc from. The output
looks like this:

    http://people.canonical.com/~mwh/subvertpy-doc/subvertpy.repos.Repository.html

Hope this helps! I think it's quite good for a 20 minute hack :-)

Cheers,
mwh

On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 03:07 +0000, Michael Hudson-Doyle wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:13:17 -0000, Jelmer Vernooij <email address hidden> wrote:
> > discuss as-in a pre-implementation call of some sort, I'm a bit clueless
> > as to where to start and what the best way is to add this kind of
> > support into pydoctor.
> Well, basically, for a C module I guess you want to insert a
> pydoctor.model.Module object that describes the module you're
> introspecting... here's a start, perhaps?
>
> lp:~mwhudson/pydoctor/introspect-c-modules
>
> See if that makes any sense :-) You need to run like this:
>
> .../introspect-c-modules/bin/pydoctor \
> ~/canonical/repos/subvertpy/trunk/subvertpy --introspect \
> subvertpy.client --introspect subvertpy.repos --introspect subvertpy.wc \
> --html-output subvertpy-doc
>
> from somewhere you can import subvertpy.client etc from. The output
> looks like this:
>
> http://people.canonical.com/~mwh/subvertpy-
> doc/subvertpy.repos.Repository.html
>
> Hope this helps! I think it's quite good for a 20 minute hack :-)
Uhm, wow! :-) This is much more than I was hoping for, thanks!

It does indeed work well on subvertpy. I'll try it on Samba tonight.

Cheers,

Jelmer

Attached a branch; pydoctor now automatically introspects .so or dll files (using imp.get_suffixes()). I also fixed a minor bug since linenumber isn't known for introspected modules.

This now works well with Samba and its almost 3 dozen C extensions:

http://samba.org/~jelmer/samba4/pydoctor/

Hi, I grabbed your branch, made a few more changes and merged it to trunk :-)

Thanks for the prod and the code!