[Pyrex] opaque types, constructors, assignment - help please

[Jose Nazario]

hello

long time user of pyrex, first time posting to the list. not the strongest 
programmer, either, so this may be easy to solve and i just don't know it.

platform:

 	- Python 2.5
 	- Pyrex 0.9.8.5
 	- gcc-4.2
 	- FreeBSD 7.0-release (on amd64)

working with FastBit, specifically it's C API:

 	http://crd.lbl.gov/~kewu/fastbit/doc/html/group__FastBitCAPI.html

trying to get the following code to work:

cdef extern from "../src/capi.h":
     ctypedef extern struct FastBitQueryHandle
     ....
     FastBitQueryHandle fastbit_build_query(char *selectClause, char 
*indexLocation, char *queryConditions)
     ....

class Query:
     # The Query class holds queries over the FastBit data set
     def __init__(self, selectClause, indexLocation, queryConditions):
         self.qh = <FastBitQueryHandle>fastbit_build_query(selectClause,
                     indexLocation, queryConditions)

not surprisingly i get an assignment error:

/var/home/jose/fastbit-ibis1.1.6/python/fastbit.pyx:235:18: Cannot convert 
'FastBitQueryHandle' to Python object


FastBitQueryHandle is a complex C++ object, easier to leave it opaque (and 
left opaque in the capi.h header, too).

the complete pyx code is up here:

 	http://monkey.org/~jose/tmp/fastbit.pyx

i've tried a few things trying to get it to assign, sometimes it will tell 
me that it can't assign because it's an incomplete type. (same thing 
happens in the ResultSet assignment).

any help in getting this building is appreciated, thanks.

________
jose nazario, ph.d.		    http://monkey.org/~jose/