Use `objc2-system-configuration` instead of `system-configuration-sys`?

[madsmtm]

Hey @dlon, @faern and @pinkisemils (and CC @pronebird).

I maintain a crate called objc2-system-configuration which is similar to system-configuration-sys. I was wondering if you'd be interested in using this crate in system-configuration instead?

objc2-system-configuration is part of the objc2 project along with a bunch of other wrappers for Apple frameworks. It is auto-generated using a custom binding generator and a small configuration file, similar to what you do with bindgen and generate_bindings.sh.

I believe objc2-system-configuration provides a number of advantages though, primarily:

• It is complete.
  • system-configuration-sys is still lacking some APIs.
• It has automatic memory management.
  • All CFRetain/CFRelease calls are handled by the binding generator (it knows about the get/create rule).
  • This means that there's no longer a need for getting it right which T::wrap_under_get_rule/T::wrap_under_create_rule to call.
  • Specifically, something like SCPreferencesGetSignature would automatically call CFRetain and return the smart pointer CFRetained.
• It has nullability information.
  • E.g. SCDynamicStoreCopyKeyList knows to return an Option<CFRetained<CFArray>>, so error-prone checks for .is_null are now unnecessary.
  • Would have caught Added null checks to dynamic store APIs #59.

I've put up #70 so you can see how it'd look, let me know what you think?

Relatedly, core-foundation is soft-deprecated in favour of objc2-core-foundation, see servo/core-foundation-rs#729 (this issue also contains more details and background on how the objc2-* crates work). So at some point it'd in the very least make sense to move to objc2-core-foundation.

[faern]

It sounds like objc2-system-configuration is much much higher level bindings than system-configuration-sys. Our sys crate are just plain generated bindings, no logic.

If we were to go ahead with this, we would just deprecate and remove the entire system-configuration-sys crate, since the main purpose of its existence is to provide the bindings that system-configuration needs.

[madsmtm]

It sounds like objc2-system-configuration is much much higher level bindings than system-configuration-sys. Our sys crate are just plain generated bindings, no logic.

Yup.

If we were to go ahead with this, we would just deprecate and remove the entire system-configuration-sys crate, since the main purpose of its existence is to provide the bindings that system-configuration needs.

I'm advocating for that, yeah.