Basics of the old Gtk# generator

A top-level make in the gtk-sharp repository does the following:

• Build the generator which handles conversion from an XML input to C# code
• Generate the api.xml files in every directory which contains a binding, by using the following rule: -api.raw has the .metadata file applied to it
  • See https://github.com/mono/gtk-sharp/blob/gtk-sharp-2-12-branch/gdk/Gdk.metadata
  • And https://github.com/mono/gtk-sharp/blob/gtk-sharp-2-12-branch/gdk/gdk-api-2.12.raw
  • Most of these are fixups to names, adding missing introspection that the perl parser did not have
  • In most cases, hidden=1 will make the generator skip the element and force you to manually bind it
  • Usually this is done by creating a method/property in the custom class as shown here
• The generator then parses the xml file and generates code based on the Generatable kind of the given member in the xml (i.e. an Object would use ObjectGen