26 February 2008

KDED & me (& Python)

It's clear that KDelicious needs a background service to periodically synchronize with the server without user intervention. KDED seems the perfect answer to this, right? You can build modules that will be started and stopped with the desktop and managed with the "Service Manager" screen in the Control Center (KControl).

Unfortunately, KDED will only load a compiled shared library, not a script or a generic command (which would have been quite handy). I've no idea why, but I guess the KDE devs had their motives when they designed the system. The latest version of kdedistutils (in the pykdeextensions package, hosted on currently-down simonzone.org) only supports the creation of C++ "glue" modules for kparts and kpartplugins, so once again I'm a bit stuck. I guess what one would need is a stub similar to the one that pykdedistutils generates for KControl plugins, KParts and KPartPlugins... I'm not fluent in C++, but I'll see if I can hack my way through. If I manage, i'll send Simon a patch for pykdedistutils.

On a side note, I noticed a few issues with kdedistutils when building KControl modules:

• it fails creating source distributions (but maybe it's me doing something daft)
• when building a binary distribution (bdist), it doesn't do static linking, which means that the produced libs are not really portable and require libpythonize to be in the exact same position on the target host.

Labels: GeekDiary, kde, kded, kdelicious, pykde, pykdeextensions

posted by GiacomoL @ 9:17 PM   0 comments links to this post

22 February 2008

kdepyuic essential patch

This little patch for kdepyuic just made my day.

kdepyuic is a small utility to produce python files from .ui files produced by QtDesigner, ready to be used in PyKDE applications; it basically adds KDE-specific stuff to the standard pyuic utility (a .ui-to-.py compiler included in the generic PyQt distribution).
This i18n patch (courtesy of Stephan Hermann) solves a few headaches with importing the correct i18n function to translate stuff, and I'd strongly recommend everyone writing KDE apps in python to apply it.

(... and this means that a kdelicious release is on its way...)

Labels: GeekDiary, kde, kdelicious, pykde, PyQt, python, Qt

posted by GiacomoL @ 7:39 AM   0 comments links to this post

18 December 2007

KDelicious 3.0 (+ roadmap)

After a few days of obsessive bugfixing, I've finally released KDelicious 3.0.

This is a big step forward from pykeylicious: it now uses PyKDE components to save preferences and interact with the network, which means transparent support for proxies and KWallet.

On the usability side, I've moved the option "Tag this post on del.icio.us" to its natural place, out of the submenu. There's now a GUI to manage options, which means that you can now switch del.icio.us username or choose how to rearrange your locally-synchronized bookmarks, all from a nice and simple interface.

Unfortunately, the resulting proliferation of files forced me to adopt a "proper" installer mechanism, and for now I settled on distutils. This has one major drawback: non-root installs are much harder than they used to be, if you don't know your way around python.

Mainly for this reason, I (foolishly) decided to maintain two codelines. Pykeylicious 2.x will still be available for people who can't be root or don't have/want the KDE bindings for python, in bugfixing mode. It will not have support for proxies, unless somebody else hacks it in. I hope this doesn't come back to bite me; I'm actually tempted to "downgrade" pykeylicious to 1.0, which got better feedback than 2.0.

In the short time (3.1) I'd like to get rid of all calls to kdialog. I resisted up to now because they work and are fairly low-maintenance, whereas using the proper bindings need a little bit more infrastructure, but they are really ugly and slow and I hate when dialogs stick around after the program crashes. I am also tempted to use the python-dcop bindings, but they look complicated and dcop is going away in KDE4 anyway, so I don't know if it's worth it.

For 3.2 I might package it for debian. The only reason for the effort is to have an "uninstall" option, that distutil hasn't. It's a boring job, but probably necessary. I'll also try out other del.icio.us plugins to steal featu--- ahem, get "inspiration" for new features.

By the time all this is done, KDE4 will have been around for a while (see my previous post)... KDelicious 4 might be a very nice app by that time ;)

Labels: delicious, GeekDiary, kde, kdelicious, pykde, pykeylicious, python

posted by GiacomoL @ 1:19 PM   0 comments links to this post

17 December 2007

Things I learnt last week on Python, PyKDE and KDE

• if PyKDE segfaults on you, don't despair: you are probably just using the wrong arguments for a method call. Get the right invocation and you'll be fine, no need for recompilation or other drastic measures.
• KCmdLineArgs is cool!
• how to use KConfig from python (saves so much time):
  conf = KConfig("your_rc_file") # ends up in $KDEHOME/share/config/
  conf.setGroup("yourgroup")
  conf.writeEntry("your_option","your_string")
  # non-string values DON'T work
  conf.sync() # this will actually write out the stuff
• KIO.NetAccess can save a lot of trouble storing passwords etc., seamlessly integrating with konqueror and kwallet
• distutils is cool, in its own way. PyPi integration looks terrific, can't wait to upload my stuff there...
• dependency checking in distutils still sucks. Either you go with setuptools, or you have to litter your setup.py with ugly import tests.
• kdedistutils (from pykdeextensions) looks useful enough
• the KDE TechBase is very good for KDE4. For KDE3, better to get the kdelibs-apidoc packages in your distro. Don't understand why (on Debian Etch) it doesn't register with QtAssistant.
• Google Translations can be weird.

I'm very close to releasing "KDelicious 3.0", which is a big improvement on pykeylicious. While adding a few "simple" options to manage how del.icio.us bookmarks are imported into Konqueror, I tried to refactor out nontrivial code from the main script into modules, and added a GUI to manage these options. I also pushed the integration with KDE in order to do things like transparent proxy support and kwallet integration, which spared me from maintain connection code, passwords, etc... I ended up with several files to distribute, which required a "proper" installer.

This release will still use the kdialog hacks. I'll get rid of them in 3.1, because I really want to put this out before the end of the week and get some feedback.

On bookmark synchronization: in an ideal world, synchronization would be done in the background, if we are online, every couple of hours, and by just pulling the more recent posts. But this is a bad world, and I'm a bad coder... KDelicious will only synchronize manually, will download all your bookmarks each time it runs, and will just try to stop you from getting banned by del.icio.us if you launch it too often. The only way around this would be to write a KService or a systray applet (which would also allow me to support other "minor" browsers like Opera), but this stuff is changing in KDE4 so I don't want to spend time on it before march.

After Christmas I'll think about putting the code on sourceforge (or savannah, or something) and have a proper homepage for it. But first, let's release ;)

Labels: Debian, delicious, GeekDiary, kde, kdelicious, konqueror, pykde, pykeylicious, PyQt, python

posted by GiacomoL @ 2:46 PM   0 comments links to this post