[PyQt] PyKDE4 Update

[Jim Bublitz]

Simon Edwards has gotten PyKDE4 in shape to go into KDE's SVN repository, so 
it should eventually begin appearing in KDE betas and release candidates. I'm 
not sure if it will make it into beta2, which is planned for this week, but 
it should appear in subsequent KDE releases.

I'll also begin making tarballs available publicly in a few weeks, probably 
beginning shortly after KDE beta2 is released. If you're desperate to look at 
this or plan to stick with beta1 for a while, I can make a beta1 tarball 
available. For the forseeable future we'll continue with the dual track 
releases: in KDE and tarballs at riverbankcomputing.

As Simon noted, the basic libs for PyKDE are complete except for Phonon. Class 
documentation is essentially complete (but not available yet) and a 
documentation/sampler/example viewer based on pykde-sampler that Troy Melhase 
did for PyKDE3 is in the works. Some of that should be releasable in a week 
or two as well.

The module lineup is about the same as PyKDE3, with a few changes. kfile has 
been rolled into the kio module, kabc/kresource are dropped, kmdi no longer 
exists, kspell is now in kdecore/kdeui as Sonnet, the solid module has been 
added, along with (tentatively) two modules that allow scripting plugins for 
the Kate editor. 

Documentation is much more complete than PyKDE3 - it actually includes - well 
- documentation. I've taken the class/method doc text from the KDE h files 
(the same stuff they generate their docs from) and put that together with 
Python method signatures. It's similar (but different) to the way PyQt 
adapted the Qt docs (but of course nothing compares to Qt's docs).  I'm 
finding it very useful and a productivity improver (you mileage, as they say, 
may vary).

In general, there's work going into making PyKDE much easier to use - for 
newbies or experienced programmers. There are also a few significant changes 
in how you write KDE code which are/will be documented.

If you'd like to contribute, example code for almost any of PyKDE's classes 
would be greatly appreciated - contact me to see what's been done already 
(most of which could probably be improved on) and what's needed.

The official KDE4 release appears to be scheduled for sometime around the end 
of the year/early next year (which isn't that far away).

Jim