Random stuff

Put out new releases of pygtk and gnome-python for GTK 1.2 and 2.0. The new releases support parallel install in the same installation of Python. The new pygtk-1.99.13 release also includes the patches necessary to build out of the box on windows.

Also updated the generated pygtk documentation. This version includes the documentation for Boxed and Pointer types, adds a class synopsis at the start of each section, and a full class heirachy at the beginning. Hopefully they will be a bit more useful for people now. I also customised the xml to html stylesheets to generate a .devhelp file, which means that I can browse the documentation in DevHelp.

On Sunday, the white of my right eye was almost completely red, which was a bit of a shock. I went to the doctor on Monday, who didn’t know what the problem was exactly, so prescribed some prednisolone eye drops. They seem to be working okay, and the red has retreated to just one side of the pupil, and will hopefully be gone in a day or too, which is a relief.

Got the nautilus view up and running. A number of pictures of an early version are at:

• Information page
• Files page
• Provides and Requires page

In the current version, provides and requires have been split onto separate pages (and I added conflicts and obsoletes), and they are only visible if there is anything to show. There is also a changelog page for information about development of the package.

I added support for looking at info about package files on disk (as opposed to info about installed packages), which didn’t take much code.

I turned off the feature where it tries to resolve “requires” or “provides” resources (so you could see which packages provided the resources the current one requires, and what packages depend on it). I just need to add some code to follow these deps on demand …

linux.conf.au

The call for papers is almost over. If you want to speak, please send in your abstracts soon.

GNOME

I started writing up some code to add RPM support to Nautilus. At the moment, I just have a simple GNOME VFS module that allows you to see what packages are on the system. You can see a sample of what it looks like here. The package sizes represent the installed size of the package (as reported in the RPM database), and the modification times are the installation times of the packages.

I still need to write some code so that you can view information about the package (probably as a nautilus view), and some utilities for installing and removing packages (these will probably be separate applications, which should cut down on the problems I ran into when writing GnoRPM. When it is finished, it should be pretty useful.

One of the annoying problems with libtool is the way the -export-symbols and -export-symbols-regex. The flags are supposed to limit which symbols in the library are available to programs that dynamically link to the library.

Unfortunately, the feature is not implemented correctly for many platforms. Rather than leaving symbols out of the dynamic symbol table, it just removes debugging information for the non-exported symbols (so not only does it not work, it also makes your code harder to debug …).

So I put together a simple patch to fix the problem. At the moment, it only changes the behaviour under Linux as I can’t verify whether it works correctly in the other cases (it probably does though). If anyone wants to try the patch, it is available at:

http://www.daa.com.au/~james/files/libtool.m4.patch

I wonder if libtool will make a new release any time soon?