Menu
▾
▴
[Pythondialog-users] pythondialog is not dead!
|
From: Florent R. <fl...@vi...> - 2010-03-16 00:10:29
|
[ Cc'ing Adam Cécile because I don't know if he's subscribed here, and
it would be nice to have pythondialog updated for squeeze. ]
Hello,
Well, there has been a long time without any pythondialog release. I
guess no bug had to be fixed. :)
I am happy to announce version 2.09[1], with enough improvements to
warrant an announcement here (see the ChangeLog excerpt at the end of
this mail). Basically, every dialog widget is now supported, except for
tailboxbg[2]. This is with the dialog version in Debian unstable, i.e.
1.1-20100119. In addition to support for new widgets, I improved the
internal function _call_program() and the demo (note: if you ever
managed to smile at the previous demo, STAY AWAY FROM THE NEW VERSION:
the jokes contained therein are EVEN MORE LETHAL. You've been warned).
This means I am resuming work on the project, and taking back
ownership... well, so long as I am given back the keys! I updated the
metadata in setup.py to have the Trove classifiers and all, but am
unfortunately not allowed to upload it to PyPI:
% ./setup.py register
running register
Using PyPI login from /home/flo/.pypirc
Server response (403): You are not allowed to store 'pythondialog'
package information
Grrrr...
----> Peter, would you be so kind to give me ownership on PyPI? Thanks
in advance. Similarly with SourceForge, BTW...
The new version is available here:
http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/projects/pythondialog/dist/
with online documentation here:
http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/2002/pythondialog/pythondialog.html
[ The old URLs I used years ago
(http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/2002/pythondialog/dist/ & Co) are still
valid, but I eventually decided to get rid of this silly naming
scheme. It may be fine for blog entries or short-term stuff, but not
for longer-term projects. ]
Future directions
-----------------
As I wrote on http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/index.en.xhtml#pythondialog:
Next things on my TODO list are Python 3 support and properly dealing
with Unicode strings. For now, non-ASCII characters are supported if
you encode them before passing them to pythondialog (for instance, to
UTF-8; of course, the terminal in use must support that encoding).
However, I think it would be nice to be able to directly use Unicode
strings, but since this area has seen significant changes between
Python 2 and Python 3, I don't think it is worth investigating the
issue before the port to Python 3.
Note to Xdialog users (still anyone out there?)
-----------------------------------------------
I didn't include the use_stdout trick for Xdialog compatibility, because
my impression is that Xdialog is pretty much dead. It still relies on
GTK+ 1.2... and is not in Debian unstable anymore (probably for this
very reason).
This catering for Xdialog's incompatibilities with dialog is the only
pythondialog regression I would expect since version 2.7 (the one on
SourceForge). Since I am not sure anyone is still using Xdialog, and
since it presents itself as a _drop-in_ replacement for dialog after
all, I'd prefer not doing the change if it turns out to be useless.
However, in case people are *still* using that, I can put it back: it
wasn't that invasive.
Changes since version 2.06
--------------------------
2010-03-14 Florent Rougon <fl...@vi...>
* Release 2.09.
* dialog.py: new supported widgets: editbox, inputmenu, mixedform,
mixedgauge, pause, passwordform, progressbox.
* demo.py: general improvements, such as:
- hopefully more helpful dialog when the user fails to select
a file in fselect;
- since actually selecting a file with this widget is already
boring after the second time, the widget can be exited by
pressing Esc or the Cancel button (in which case the parts
of the demo that need the file path will be skipped).
- replace a few calls to Dialog.scrollbox() by calls to
Dialog.msgbox(), since the latter provides nice automatic
line wrapping.
* demo.py: support GNU-style option passing with getopt.py; you
can use --help to get a list of available options
* demo.py: no need to change a global variable anymore to switch
the demo to "fast mode", just use --fast
* demo.py: add --test-suite mode, mainly for developers: it
tests *all* widgets, not only those included in the "default
mode", and automatically enables "fast mode".
* dialog.py(__call_program): make the function more generic. stdin
redirection doesn't involve automatic pipe(2) creation in
__call_program() anymore; instead, __call_program expects a file
descriptor when it is asked to redirect dialog's stdin (parameter
'redir_child_stdin_from_fd').
The caller may still decide to create a pipe and pass its file
descriptor for reading as the 'redir_child_stdin_from_fd'
parameter, but the new possibility of redirecting dialog's stdin
from an arbitrary file descriptor allows for instance to redirect
it from an existing file, network socket... This is used to
implement --progressbox cleanly.
This change has the additional benefit of simplifying the API,
since __call_program()'s return value is always a 2-element tuple
now.
* dialog.py(__call_program): new close_fds option causing the
child process to close the specified file descriptors before the
execve(2) system call. This is useful for instance to have the
child close an end of a pipe he isn't going to use. Without that,
deadlocks could happen because of the child never seeing EOF from
the pipe.
* dialog.py: use warnings.warn(..., DeprecationWarning) for
obsolete functions.
* dialog.py: remove convoluted syntax *(<list>,) that was used at
several places. I don't see any use for this syntax anymore, and
changing it to simply <list> didn't make the universe collapse (so
far).
* dialog.py: prefix attributes for internal use (such as
Dialog._call_program) with a single underscore instead of a double
one: we don't need the name mangling here. These underscores in
dialog.py are just an indication that the attribute is "internal"
and thus subject to API changes, etc. Thanks to Peter Åstrand for
pointing this out.
* setup.py:
- improve the long description, use ReStructuredText
- add Trove classifiers
- add download_url
* Review and update README, TODO...
2010-02-19 Florent Rougon <fl...@vi...>
* dialog.py: add support for --dselect
* dialog.py: add support for DIALOG_ITEM_HELP
* demo.py: small fixes
2009-10-31 Florent Rougon <fl...@vi...>
* Released 2.08, skipping version 2.07 to avoid creating confusion
with the 2.7 version released by Peter Åstrand in 2004.
2009-02-04 Florent Rougon <fl...@vi...>
* Add support for --form.
* dialog.py(__call_program): compute the argument list before
forking, otherwise things get difficult to understand if this
computation raises an exception.
Footnotes
---------
[1] Yeah, I know very well it is the same as 2.9 (in the most
common/sane versioning scheme), but I started this way years ago,
and 2.09 / 2.10 / etc. sort much better than 2.9 in lexicographic
order, which is always pleasant in a directory listing such as:
http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/projects/pythondialog/dist/
[2] tailboxbg looks a bit annoying to support because of the
--and-widget way of "multiplexing" widgets.
--
Florent
|
