[PyKDE] PyKDE-3.8rc1 Released

[Jim Bublitz]

I just put PyKDE-3.8rc1 up at SourceForge: 
(http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/pykde)

This isn't the final release, which is probably a week or two 
away. It has the following new stuff:

- Builds with SuSE 8.2/Mandrake 9.1/RH 9.0 (all tested)
- Fixed subclass (%ConvertToSubClassCode) stuff - Gordon Tyler's 
patch plus a lot of additional classes covered (in all modules)
- Use latest build.py from Hans-Peter Jensen with a lot of added 
hacking for new features (no screaming please)
- Include support for panel applets written in Python (no C++ 
requred) - see below
- fixes KApplication.quit/KMainWindow.queryClose bug
- added program template section

The major new stuff is the panel applet support (thanks again to 
David Boddie). This has two parts - a sip/PyKDE independent lib 
(libpythonize) which provides C++ support for embedding Python 
(in directory pythonize/) and a PyKPanelApplet class/C++ lib for
loading Python applets/panel applet installer. There are docs in 
the docs/ directory for both libpythonize (minimal) and panel 
applets (exhaustive, I hope).

I'd really like to hear comments/criticisms on the libpythonize 
stuff and panel applet implementation - I plan to extend the 
same ideas to cover panel extensions, KParts, styles, and 
whatever else can be turned in to a plugin in KDE (and it 
appears that Qt4/KDE4 will be even more plugin based). I'd 
appreciate any improvements before I go much farther with that 
stuff. There's also some really useless and ugly panel applets 
in the pykpanelapplet/ directory too.

The only thing that makes this an "rc" release is that there is 
still some cleanup needed on the examples/ subdirectory (really 
a mess) and the panel applet installer needs a little work - it 
installs applets nicely, but doesn't always behave well if you 
try to install something that isn't an applet (it won't let you 
do that, but it occasionally crashes for a small subset of 
invalid attempts). There are probably a couple of other small 
things that I'm forgetting that need fixing too, but nothing 
else comes to mind at the moment. --- I did just remember the 
other thing - if you write your own .desktop file for an applet, 
the installer won't update it properly. For now, if you use the 
installer, it's probably best to let it write the .desktop file 
(it's just some code I never finished and forgot about 'til 
now).

There isn't any need to download this and install it, unless 
you're interested in seeing the new features right away or would 
like to help out with testing (always appreciated).

PACKAGERS: I would appreciate it if anyone thinking of producing 
packages for this would take a look at it - particularly the 
install target at the end of the Makefile in pykpanelapplet/. 
The way this goes together, it's necessary to make sure a lot of 
extra libs are visible for loading (libsip, libqtcmodule, 
libkdeuicmodule, etc), so there are a huge number of symlinks 
done, and a final '/sbin/ldconfig' at the end of 'make install'. 
I'm not sure how/if this affects packaging. The number of 
symlinks is kind of ridiculous, but the other option is 
attempting to edit the user's ld.so.conf file, and I'd prefer 
not to do that.

As far as I know, I'm caught up on bug reports and requests - let 
me know if I missed anything.

Jim