Automating the Generation of Python Bindings in QGIS
If you are a PyQGIS developer, you probably already stumbled upon a situation where you needed to look at the signature of a QGIS function, and you dive into the C++ documentation or source code. This is not the friendliest thing if you are not a C++ developer…
Fortunately, @timlinux developed a tool for generating documentation for the Python API, and thanks to great work of @RouzaudDenis and @_mkuhn, it is now possible to generate the sip files automatically from the header files. Before, the sip file had to be created manually by the developer, which means it was subject to human mistakes (like for instance forgetting to port a function).
To support this automated generation for the entire source code, it is necessary to annotate the headers with the relevant SIP notations. As an example, I may not want to port the dataItem_t pointer to Python, in which case I would annotate the header with SIP_SKIP.
typedef QgsDataItem *dataItem_t( QString, QgsDataItem * ) SIP_SKIP;
A good place to start, before adding automated SIP generation to headers, is to read the SIP Bindings section, of the QGIS coding standards, or even having a look at qgis.h, where all these annotations(macros) are defined.
The sip files which are currently not generated automatically, are defined in autosip_blacklist.sh, so if you want to automate a sip, the first thing would be to remove that file from this list. Then you may run the sipify_all.sh script, which will scan through all the files which are not blacklisted and generate the sip files for them. This will generate a new sip file for the one you removed from the blacklist. If you compare the new file with the old file, in most of the cases the signatures of the functions won’t change. In that case, you don’t need to do anything. If you find differences in the signature, it is because there are some special instructions between “/”, like /Factory/ which you need to support. To do that, you need to add the appropriated annotations in the header file. Once you do it, run the script again and check if the old and new sip match. If they do match, then you have supported the automated generation of the sip file; otherwise, you need to go again to the header and check what is missing.
There are still many sip files left to be automated, so we encourage you to contribute to QGIS with PR on this matter! 
