J5’s Blog

April 19, 2010

GNOME Python Wrapup

Filed under: D-Bus, Gnome, OLPC, Python, community, conference — J5 @ 12:43 pm

What a week. Get six smart people in the same room together, spend a little bit of money to get them there and get them comfortable, and good things happen. An in-depth praise for the hackfest process, which the GNOME Foundation Board has been putting more and more resources into every year, will have to wait until another blog post. Right now I want to thank our sponsors and quickly recap what was accomplished. First out sponsors, who made this possible:

  • The GNOME Foundation board for providing the framework for the hackfest and travel assistance to Tomeu
  • OLPC for providing us free space and all the water we could drink at their office in Cambridge.
  • Canonical for making sure we were awake after the social events by providing us with coffee
  • Red Hat, for feeding us with a nice Portuguese meal which we shared with the D-Conf/GSettings hackfest guys who were sponsored by Novell
  • Myself, for sponsoring a couple of after hours social events to keep us all sane and allow us to discuss the future in a more social environment

I would also like to thank Walter Bender for helping us find a venue and Jeorge Castro for being the liaison between us and the Foundation. He is off to a great start as the newest Board Member.

Now to the meat of what was accomplished:

  • PyGI saw its first formal release
  • We suckered relative new comer Zack Goldberg into ongoing maintainership of PyGI
  • Cairo, callback and virtual function support was added to PyGI
  • pygobject and pygi both sprouted py3k branches on GNOME’s git servers which both fully compile and pass their unit tests (which probably means we need more unit tests). We aren’t going to move these to master for some time. But if you grab the branches and test them out the process will be much quicker.
  • We were written up in Ars Technica

Right now I am porting D-Feet to use PyGI and will be testing out my D-Bus Python py3k branch after I get that up and running. D-Feet is a good test because it uses the GenericTreeModel from PyGtk as well as GtkBuilder elements. In both cases I have found places where I have had to add overrides to PyGI to complete the bindings. For instance, in the Builder I need to override gtk_builder_connect_signals which in C searches for C symbols which match symbols in the XML description file. This is useless in Python so I need to modify it to work the same way PyGTK works. Namely, by being able to pass in a dictionary or object with name/python function mappings (e.g. {’on_click’: on_click_handler}). It is not all that hard, especially since PyGI overrides are written in Python and not in C like PyGtk overrides. However I do have to get the exception behaviour correct so that might take some time.

All and all we are in excellent shape so start porting your apps and file bugs!!!

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April 15, 2010

GNOME Python Hackfest Day 2 quick roundup

Filed under: Gnome, Python, conference — J5 @ 9:39 pm

We are back from dinner where we met up with some of the D-Conf hackfest guys. Thanks to sponsorship from Red Hat and Novell we nourished ourselves with some decent Portuguese cuisine and are now back hacking for a bit before we turn in for the night. We’ve been working hard today, building on the great start we had on day 1.

Because of our work we have pushed py3k branches for both pygobject and pygi into the main GNOME git repo. They don’t pass their test suites yet but they compile under Python 2.6 and 3.1. The plan is to get them passing their test suites on these platforms and then test for regressions for older versions of Python.

Also the cairo bindings and callback support are almost ready to be merged into master pending code review. As soon as that happens I am going to merge it with the py3k branch and eventually we will move the py3k branch into master after much testing from the community.

I’m going to finish up debugging this long vs. int issue and will be heading home.

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April 14, 2010

GNOME Python Hackfest Day 1

Filed under: Gnome, Python, conference — J5 @ 5:48 pm

As day 1 is coming to a close let us quickly recount the work that has been started:

  • We started by debating the way forward and came up with an action plan – In the short term PyGtk will be ported to Python 3.0 but start moving to using PyGI under the hood when wrapping non-overridden functions. PyGI will be developed in parallel to both support PyGtk and eventually replace it.
  • I have gone and setup a build environment and documented it on the wiki along with the places to get various modules as well as helping out with some of the Py3k issues
  • John Ehresman has been working on his github branch to bring Py3k support to PyGObject
  • David Malcolm has been working on the PyGI Py3k support
  • Zach Goldberg and Colin Walters have been working on the PyGI callback support, both code reviewing the current patches and discussing the best way to support callbacks given the way the gjs bindings handle them
  • Tomue is working on introspection for cairo so we can use it from PyGI
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Caffeined up and starting to hack

Filed under: Gnome, Python, conference — J5 @ 10:08 am

We have arrived at One Cambridge Centre and the GNOME Python Hackfest is up and running. Thanks to the coffee sponsored by our friends over at Canonical, we are wasting no time whipping these bindings into shape.

If you wish to participate you can follow us on #pygi on gimpnet and look at the wiki at http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/Python2010.

I’m getting my jhbuild environment up and running and will post instructions to the wiki as well as updates my blog throughout the day. For now here are the module you will need to help us hacking. The wiki also has a list of bugs with patches to check out.

  • glib – from your distro
  • gobject-introspect – from your distro or git head
  • gir-repository – from your distro or git head
  • pygobject – git head
  • pygi – git head
  • python3 – from python.org or your distro (optional if you want to help with the python3 port)

All of the above modules besides python3 can be found at the gnome.org git repos.

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April 12, 2010

GNOME Python Hackfest Thanks to Sponsors

Filed under: Gnome, Python, conference — J5 @ 4:20 pm

As we are getting ready to host the GNOME Python Hackfest I would like to take this time to thank our sponsors. Thanks goes out to The GNOME Foundation for sponsoring Tomeu’s travel; One Laptop Per Child for giving us a place to hold the hackfest; to Canonical for supplying coffee and some snacks to keep us awake; and to Red Hat for sponsoring a dinner for us hungry, hungry, hackers.

I will also be personally sponsoring tickets to a concert featuring Carbon Leaf and local act Tim Blane. I’m actually in it for Tim Blane who’s latest EP Traces is available for free in Vorbis and Flac formats. Yay for free music in free formats!

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April 7, 2010

GTK+ Python Hackfest in a week

Filed under: Uncategorized — J5 @ 4:30 pm

Is it that time already? The GTK+ Python Hackfest is coming to Cambridge, MA. Right over the Longfellow bridge from historic Boston, we will be hacking at the OLPC offices to get the GTK+ Python bindings fully Python 3.0 compatible and moved over to using GIntrospect as its base.

Thanks goes out to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring the hackfest, OLPC for providing space and Walter Bender of Sugar Labs for setting us up with a host.

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