It may be more efficient this way on supported compilers.
Some of the private functions cannot be marked with this macro because
they are used across GIMP libraries (for instance some libgimp
functions are used in libgimpui, but are not meant to be public), while
they are not made public in headers. These are still considered private,
as far as API stability is concerned.
These are not usable by plug-ins anymore which should store their data between
runs as arguments or aux arguments (in case of values which should be stored
from one run to another but are not really usable for non-interactive scripts).
These are per-plug-in (not polluting the whole process space with just random
strings as identifiers which could be used by other plug-ins) and even survive
restarts of GIMP.
I still keep these functions, but only internally, as they are used to store
settings of GimpAspectPreview, GimpDrawablePreview and GimpZoomPreview across
plug-in runs. Still I changed their API to set and return a GBytes directly
(mimicking the private PDB functions' API).
Also I remove gimp_pdb_get_data_size() which is useless when exchanging GBytes
directly.
Note that the 2 functions are still exported in the library, and only not
advertized through headers (so they are not really internal, just hidden), on
purpose, because we need to call them in libgimpui. So it is still relatively
easy for a plug-in to use them. Nevertheless I made clear in the function
documentation that these must not be considered public and could end up deleted
at any time. Any plug-in still trying to call these takes the risk of having
their code relying on unreliable API.
Add gimplegacy-private.h to keep it separate from gimp-private.h.
The legacy code could now be removed and GimpPlugIn-ported plug-ins
would not notice.
The idea is that we already have a GimpProcedure object in libgimp
which has name, help, blurb, arguments, return values and everything,
so we really don't need a parallel API to query PDB procedures for
their properties.
- make run() a virtual function of GimpProcedure
- move GIMP_PDB_ERROR to GimpPDB
- GimpPDBProcedure is a trivial subblass which populates
GimpProcedure's members by querying the PDB.
- make "plug-in", "procedure-type" and "name" construct-only
properties of GimpProcedure.
This is all work in progress.
Jehan