Monthly Archives: September 2003

PyGTK

A story was posted on FootNotes about the 2.0 release. A number of nice comments. The 2.0.0 package has hit Mandrake cooker, and a Fink package is apparently in the works.

I’ve started work on adding support for the GTK 2.2 APIs, which shouldn’t take very long at all. I’ve updated the .defs files, which covers most of the APIs. There are some others that will require a little more work.

PyGTK 2.2 will be a drop in replacement for 2.0.0 when it is ready, just as GTK 2.2 is.

Mail Viruses

Only 5 days til I stop receiving bounces from the sobig worm! I had hoped that people would fix their mail servers, to not send out these erroneous bounces, but no such luck 🙁

I wonder when the next one will strike?

TV

The new series of CNNNN started a couple of weeks ago. Been pretty good so far. I don’t think it is the kind of show that they could syndicate overseas though 🙂

Finally got version 2.0 of PyGTK, PyORBit and Gnome-Python out. I sent the announcements a bit further than usual this time (gnome-announce-list, python-announce, etc). Already, it is in Debian, Mandrake Cooker and there is a Win32 installer. PyGTK is also buildable/runnable on MacOS X, provided that you have an X server installed (such as Apple’s one). If you have been holding off from looking at PyGTK 1.99.x, you should definitely take a look now.

This release has been a long time in the making:

• 595 revisions to the ChangeLog (out of 670 revisions on the main branch in CVS) since branching the 1.2 bindings.
• Over 5000 lines in the ChangeLog.
• Over 3 years since branching.

The result is a binding that is a lot nicer to use, and will be much easier to maintain. It does demonstrate that you lose a lot of time when you decide to do a rewrite. At the same time, I don’t know if it would have been feasible to get from the old 1.2 bindings to where we are now in small incremental steps. I am very happy with what we have now though.

Updating the binding for GTK 2.2 (and GTK 2.4 after that) is going to be a lot easier and quicker. All the infrastructure is in place, so it is a simple matter of adding the new APIs. The 2.0 to 2.2 delta is much smaller than the 1.2 to 2.0 delta.

It is a similar story for the Gnome bindings, although we will probably skip to Gnome 2.4, since it is almost out and contains some new APIs that are interesting from a language bindings perspective. I won’t need to rewrite the CORBA bindings this time either 🙂.