23 November 1999
Working on gnorpm again. I am converting the rpmfind code over to a non blocking architecture using the glibwww code I wrote (a thin wrapper around the W3C's libwww that uses the glib mainloop for transfers). It is not currently finished, but it is getting there. Apparently the gtkhtml guys are using glibwww as well. Maybe it would be a good idea to split the code into a separate package at some point. For now, it means there are other people to help find and fix bugs in the code :) Libwww is a bit of a beast if you try to do something non trivial in a way that the authors did not expect. I know all libraries are like this, but libwww seems to be more so. Once I have these changes finished, I should install that copy of Red Hat 6.1 to see what the problems were with it. Probably merge in some of the Red Hat patches in the RH6.1 RPM of gnorpm and release 0.11 (if I call it 0.10, there will be people calling it 0.1, which is quite old now). I should do some more hacking on dia. I am looking at adding a python scripting interface. With a few modifications, it should be possible to add extra menu items that trigger python functions. Alexander has made Dia nice and modular, so this should be pretty easy. This interface should be powerful enough to do full manipulation of diagrams, and also extract information from a diagram for writing export filters. I want to be able to use the interface to export UML diagrams to UXF format and circuit diagrams to SPICE net files for instance. One thing that will be needed is a general way of reading and modifying the properties on objects. There was some talk on the list of adding this, which will be good.