[Pythondialog-users] pythondialog 3.0.0 released

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

Hello,

I am pleased to announce the release of pythondialog 3.0.0. You can read
a summary of the changes in this version at:

  http://pythondialog.sourceforge.net/#news-3.0

For your convenience, here is a text dump of this summary:

Main changes in version 3.0.0

   The major version number has been increased because this version is not
   completely backward-compatible with version 2. However, the
   backward-incompatible changes are small and unlikely to affect many
   people, if any (see below). The main changes in version 3.0.0 are:

     * Full help support for all widgets

       You can now use the keyword arguments (“dialog common options”)
       help_button, help_label, item_help, help_tags and help_status with
       any widget to provide help facilities to the user (as long as the
       dialog backend supports the corresponding options). Please refer to
       the Dialog class docstring in the [10]documentation for details.
       demo.py has a number of examples showing how to implement help
       support in user code.
       The API extends what was already present for help support in the
       'menu' widget. Backward-compatibility is only affected for people
       who used to parse the dialog output after the Help button has been
       pressed, because this is now automatically done by pythondialog in
       order to return ready to use, structured data. If you only check
       the Dialog exit code, you are not affected.
       pythondialog should now offer access to all help facilities
       provided by the dialog backend.

     * Nicer exit codes for widget-producing methods

       The old, low-level exit codes d.DIALOG_OK, d.DIALOG_CANCEL,
       d.DIALOG_ESC, d.DIALOG_HELP, d.DIALOG_ITEM_HELP and d.DIALOG_EXTRA
       are deprecated (where d is a Dialog instance). They still work, but
       trigger a DeprecationWarning (see README.rst or [11]its HTML
       rendering for instructions on how to enable deprecation warnings).
       You should now use d.OK, d.CANCEL, d.ESC, d.HELP and d.EXTRA, or
       equivalently Dialog.OK, Dialog.CANCEL, Dialog.ESC, Dialog.HELP and
       Dialog.EXTRA (attributes of the Dialog class). These are called the
       high-level exit codes, or Dialog exit codes, and defined as
       strings: "ok", "cancel", "esc", "help" and "extra". You should use
       the == operator when comparing to these codes.

       Notes:

          + There is no ITEM_HELP in the high-level exit codes: the
            DIALOG_HELP and DIALOG_ITEM_HELP low-level codes are both
            translated into Dialog.HELP. Indeed, the program that has to
            interpret the code already knows whether it used
            item_help=True in the widget call or not. Both cases
            correspond to the same user action: the Help button being
            pressed. Therefore, the distinction is not useful to user
            code.

          + As said, the values of the high-level exit codes are strings:
            "ok", "cancel", "esc", "help" and "extra". You may use the
            string literals directly in your code, instead of d.OK or
            Dialog.OK, d.CANCEL or Dialog.CANCEL, etc. With proper syntax
            highlighting, this produces good-looking code, but offers no
            protection against typos, contrary to the Dialog class
            attributes Dialog.OK and friends. Apart from that, it is
            mostly a matter of taste.

          + Backward-compatibility should only be affected for code that
            relies on the nature of d.DIALOG_OK, d.DIALOG_CANCEL,
            d.DIALOG_ESC, d.DIALOG_HELP, d.DIALOG_ITEM_HELP and
            d.DIALOG_EXTRA, which were integers in pythondialog 2 and are
            now strings (the deprecated attributes are mapped to the
            high-level exit codes, so that the vast majority of old user
            code still works without modification, despite the changes).

     * Better Extra button support

          + A few widgets, when the Extra button was pressed, used to
            return None instead of the expected value corresponding to
            user input. This is fixed.

          + Similarly to help support, pythondialog now automatically
            parses the dialog output when the Extra button has been
            pressed, in order to return ready to use, structured data
            (normally: the same as if OK had been pressed). This is
            backward-incompatible.

       Extra button support should now be as good as in the dialog
       backend. See the Dialog class docstring for details.

     * 'buildlist' widget support

     * New retval_is_code decorator that sets the attribute of the same
       name on its argument. This attribute allows to reliably detect if a
       widget-producing method returns a Dialog exit code or a sequence
       whose first element is a Dialog exit code. This is used in the
       demo, and was necessary since the new exit codes from
       widget-producing methods are strings, and thus sequences.

-- 
Florent