C is notoriously difficult to bind from other languages
without additional metadata. The C ABI does not include
enums and macros that are an essential component of the
API.
To make Wireshark instrospectable and more binding friendly
include an introspection API to export enums and integer macros.
To avoid the tedious need to manually keep the code up to date
it uses the excellent pyclibrary python package to automatically
parse C headers and extract this data.
This is not a process that should be done automatically during
the build.
This could be used for example to replace most of the wslua
make-init-lua.pl perl script, which tries to do the same thing
using regular expressions.
Besides the downside of using Perl using regular expressions
is inferior to pyclibrary in 2 ways: 1) pyclibrary understands
most of C99 grammar so it is much more powerful; 2) pyclibrary
has a specific API to extract "values" (enums and constants)
automagically. We just need to take care to use only integer
values, for our purposes.
João Valverde