[Pythondialog-users] New pythondialog releases, Python 3 support, git repository, improved web site

[Florent R. <f.r...@fr...>]

Dear users,

I am pleased to announce the releases of pythondialog 2.12 and 2.13
(yes, like Halley's Comet). In order to avoid confusion like there has
been in the past, and thanks to the prompt cooperation of Peter Åstrand,
I am now maintaining pythondialog at SourceForge, at the same place
where the old 1.0 and 2.7 releases were uploaded.

The new releases add Python 3 support, a few improvements (actually,
many improvements if you didn't upgrade after version 2.7), and close
all SourceForge bugs. Moreover, you can now follow pythondialog's
development with its git repository[1] and easily compare[2] between
/any/ version ever released, as I incorporated all history back to
version 1.0 in this git repository.

  [1] http://sourceforge.net/p/pythondialog/code/

  [2] git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/pythondialog/code pythondialog
      cd pythondialog       # and then for instance:
      git diff v2.12 v2.13

I also revamped the website[3]. Please tell me if you find any error. I
hope it looks nicer this way. Additionally, it is now up-to-date and
contains a "Screenshots" page with a picture of every widget supported
in pythondialog, so that you can quickly and easily see what is
available and how it looks like.

  [3] http://pythondialog.sourceforge.net/

If you want to read about the main changes in versions 2.12 and 2.13,
you can find them right there on the main page. Alternatively, I've
copy/pasted a plain text rendering of these changes below for your
convenience.

Finally, a quick link to the download page for the impatient:

  <http://sourceforge.net/projects/pythondialog/files/pythondialog/>

Ah, err... this reminds me that the PyPI[4] entry for pythondialog is
still referencing and distributing version 2.7 only, effectively hiding
all subsequent versions for many users, thanks to our dear friend
"paulproteus" who had the brilliant idea of opening this PyPI entry
under his own account. For this reason, none of the past or present
pythondialog maintainers can update this page! I have tried to contact
him about this (with a Google search for the email address, since PyPI
doesn't give any), with no luck so far. Ugh. If anyone of you know him,
please get in touch with him. Next step is to file a support request at
PyPI.

  [4] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pythondialog/


-----------------------------------
Main changes in the latest releases
-----------------------------------

  [ What follows is a plain text dump of
    <http://pythondialog.sourceforge.net/index.html#news>.

    For more detailed changes, please refer to the ChangeLog file in a
    release tarball or use "git log" from the git repository (you can
    also read the same log online at the address [1] mentioned above,
    after following the "History" link). ]

   In short, the latest versions (2.12 and 2.13) only support Python 3; users
   who really want to stick to Python 2 should use version 2.11 for now. The
   naming of each tarball clearly indicates which major version of Python it
   has been prepared for.


  Main changes in version 2.13
  ****************************

   The main changes in version 2.13 are:

     * a new set_background_title() method (replacing the long-obsolete
       setBackgroundTitle() from pythondialog 1.0) that does proper "dash
       escaping"[5];

     * documentation improvements for the Dialog class.

       [5] This could be useful if you (somewhat strangely) chose a
           backtitle that starts with a double dash ("--"). Without dash
           escaping, it might be mistaken for a dialog option.


  Main changes in version 2.12
  ****************************

   The main changes in version 2.12 are:

     * Python 3 support. You can (and should) now pass "normal" strings to
       pythondialog calls, which correspond to Unicode strings in
       Python 2-speak. Python will automatically encode the arguments
       according to the current locale when calling dialog.
       pythondialog-based scripts can be written in any encoding (using an
       encoding declaration if the encoding is not UTF-8), and everything
       will be automatically recoded according to the user's locale when he
       runs the script.

       Of course, if the script tries to display a character that can't be
       represented in the user's locale, there is a problem. For instance,
       the "Y" (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS) and euro sign don't
       exist in ISO 8859-1, therefore if the terminal is running under a
       locale based on ISO 8859-1, it can't display any of these characters
       and there is nothing that pythondialog can do about that. However, if
       using only characters that can be represented in the user's locale,
       there is no problem and everything is automatically translated between
       the encoding of the Python script and the encoding defined by the
       user's locale. In particular, this last condition is almost always
       satisfied when the user's locale is based on Unicode, since this
       character set can represent just about anything that can be found in
       the myriad of legacy character sets.

     * Proper escaping of user-supplied values in case they start with two
       dashes ("--"). Such strings could be confused with dialog options in
       previous versions, since pythondialog didn't do any such escaping
       before version 2.12.

     * Much easier debugging, with Dialog.setup_debug(), its optional use in
       the demo and the new traceback handling thanks to the traceback module
       (see the documentation, history link on the git repository, or
       ChangeLog file in a release tarball for details). In case there is a
       problem with the demo, or if you just want to look under the hood, you
       can now run it with --debug (and optionally --debug-file) to make it
       write the full dialog command lines to a file.

     * Standard exception behavior: if e is a dialog.error instance (or an
       instance of a dialog.error subclass), then str(e) returns nothing more
       than the exception message, as with all Python built-in exceptions. No
       need to write e.complete_message() anymore.

     * Support for many "common options" has been added: --ascii-lines,
       --colors, --column-separator, --date-format, --exit-label,
       --extra-button, --extra-label, --hfile, --hline, --keep-tite,
       --keep-window, --no-collapse, --no-lines, --no-mouse, --no-nl-expand,
       --no-ok, --scrollbar, --time-format, --trace and --visit-items. The
       new method Dialog.maxsize() allows one to find the terminal size and
       know how many lines and columns are available for a dialog box.

     * The pythondialog version is now accessible as dialog.__version__
       (attribute of the dialog module), as per Python standards;
       additionally, the version of the dialog backend in use can be obtained
       with Dialog.backend_version() (method of Dialog instances).

     * Transition from PythonDialogIOError to PythonDialogOSError. As you may
       be aware of, the exception hierarchy has been reworked in Python 3.3,
       and from this version onwards, IOError is an alias of OSError. In this
       context, it would be nice to get rid of PythonDialogIOError in favor
       of PythonDialogOSError. pythondialog 2.12 prepares this transition in
       the following way.

       PythonDialogIOError is now a subclass of PythonDialogOSError so that
       users can safely replace "except PythonDialogIOError" clauses with
       "except PythonDialogOSError" even if running under Python < 3.3.
       pythondialog will raise PythonDialogOSError instead of
       PythonDialogIOError when Python stops distinguishing between IOError
       and OSError, i.e. when running under Python 3.3 or later.

-- 
Florent