xcffib is the XCB binding for Python.

For most end users of software that depends on xcffib or developers writing code against xcffib, you can use the version of xcffib on pypi. To install it, you'll need libxcb's headers and libxcb-render's headers (these are available via sudo apt-get install libxcb-render0-dev on Ubuntu). Once you have the C headers installed, you can just pip install xcffib.

If you're interested in doing development, read on...

You should be able to install all the language deps from hackage or pip. .github/workflows/ci.yaml has an example of how to install the dependencies on Ubuntu flavors.

See the Makefile for examples on how to run the tests. Your contribution should at pass make check before it can be merged. The newtests make target can be used to regenerate expected haskell test data if the tests are failing because you made a change to the generated python code.

Sometimes (more often recently), xcbproto makes some updates that we need to do some work for. These often require some updates to xcb-types as well. First, hack your changes into xcb-types and cabal install them, then git clone the version of xcbproto you want to somewhere, e.g. ~/packages:

~/packages $ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/xcbproto.git

Finally, you can build/test xcffib against this custom version of xcb-{proto|types} with:

make XCBDIR=~/packages/xcbproto/src check

To go along with new xcbproto elements, sometimes you need to hack on newer versions of xcb-types. Newer cabals require you to do something like:

echo packages: ../xcb-types/xcb-types.cabal ./xcffib.cabal > cabal.project

In order to find locally modified versions of xcb-types.