J5’s Blog

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!!!

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]