It’s a Python Bug

I am not perfect. Therefore the code I write is not perfect. Every once in a (rare!) while I have been known to write code that people of evil mind could use. I deserve blame for that. I do not deserve this kind of blame.

What we have here is a Python bug: when embedding Python, we (and half a dozen other applications) use PySys_SetArgv according to spec. Python, in its wisdom, uses that as a clue to start loading python files in unexpected places. The right thing to do would be to fix Python as well as any code that might depend on the bug. That was not done.

Somehow it was chosen instead to file this against Gnumeric and half a dozen other applications. As a design error no less. That is simply offensive! Let us hope no problem is found in libc’s malloc, because dealing with bug reports for all users of that would take some effort.

Why does Python get this kind of reputation protection? They screwed up, so let them take the blame and have them fix the bug. If that breaks other applications, well so be it – the Python people will eloquently explain that to their community.

The Gtk+ File Chooser Dialog

Whenever I update my OpenSuSE installation, the Gtk+ File Chooser Dialog get worse. This is how it looks for me on OpenSuSE 11.1 when used from Gnumeric. It looks more or less the same from Gedit and Mozilla.

Gtk+ File Chooser Dialog
Gtk+ File Chooser Dialog

I hope I am not breaking new ground when I claim that the purpose of the file chooser is to help the user choose a file. How is that going to happen when the area used for files is less than the size of one button?

I really hope other people are seeing something sane, but this is with a vanilla install, I think. (Note: I mention OpenSuSE 11.1 for reference, not as an assignment of blame.)

OpenSuSE 11.1 First Impressions

I have been running OpenSuSE 11.1 for about a week now. My first impression is that it feels nicer, but that there are severe setbacks that slipped through QA.

  • It seems to boot faster than 11.0. I was never really bothered by the boot time, so I do not have concrete measurements.
  • The 30000-wakeups-per-second bug is gone! Yeah!
  • It’s still Beagle-infested, so everything is dog slow out of the box. I am having a hard time thinking anyone with a laptop really likes to have Beagle on it. Oh well, I simply use rpm to erase anything related to beagle and install Gnu’s locate.
  • Printing on my hplj-3330 works, but I had to force it to use a non-default driver. That’s not a big deal for me, but it fails the Grandma-test.
  • I plug in my camera. I am asked if I want to import photos to f-spot. I do. f-spot then starts but tells me “Could not lock device”. A bit of poking around reveals that gvfsd-gphoto2 needs to be killed for f-spot to work.
  • The Cairo shipped, 1.8.0, is old and has a badly-broken pdf backend. This evidently is known in Cairo land. I wouldn’t expect anything that prints using gtk+ to work right. Also, since Gnumeric’s tests fail, I need to work around that before I can do releases again.