(Update: Link to Tomeu s blog post, repost for
planet.gnome.org)
Last week I was in Prague to attend the
GNOME/Python 2011 Hackfest for gobject-introspection, to which Tomeu Vizoso kindly invited me after I
started working with PyGI some months ago. It happened at a place called
brmlab which was quite the right environment for a bunch of 9 hackers: Some comfy couches and chairs, soldering irons, lots of old TV tubes, chips, and other electronics, a big Pirate flag, really good Wifi, plenty of Club Mate and Coke supplies, and not putting unnecessary effort into mundane things like wallpapers.
It was really nice to get to know the upstream experts John (J5) Palmieri and Tomeu Vizoso (check out
Tomeu s blog post for his summary and some really nice photos). When sitting together in a room, fully focussing on this area for a full week, it s so much easier to just ask them about something and getting things done and into upstream than on IRC or bugzilla, where you don t know each other personally. I certainly learned a lot this week (and not only how great Czech beer tastes
)!
So what did I do?
Application porting
After already having ported four Ubuntu PyGTK applications to GI before (
apport,
jockey,
aptdaemon, and
language-selector),
my main goal and occupation during this week was to start porting a bigger PyGTK application. I picked
system-config-printer, as it s two magnitudes bigger than the previous projects, exercises quite a lot more of the GTK GI bindings, and thus also exposes a lot more GTK annotation and pygobject bugs. This resulted in a new
pygi s-c-p branch which has the first 100 rounds of test, break, fix iterations. It now at least starts, and you can do a number of things with it, but a lot of functionality is still broken.
As a kind of finger exercise and also to check for how well pygi-convert works for small projects now, I also
ported computer-janitor. This went really well (I had it working after about 30 minutes), and also led me to finally
fixing the unicode vs. str mess for GtkTreeView that you got so far with Python 2.x.
pygobject and GTK fixes
Porting system-config-printer and computer-janitor uncovered a lot of opportunities to
improve pygi-convert.sh, a big perl -e kind of script to do the mechanical grunt work of the porting process. It doesn t fix up changed signatures (such as adding missing arguments which were default arguments in PyGTK, or the ubiquitous user_data argument for signal handlers), but at least it gets a lot of namespaces, method, and constant names right.
I also fixed three
annotation fixes in GTK+. We also collaboratively reviewed and tested
Pavel s annotation branch which helped to fix tons of problems, especially after Steve Fr cinaux s excellent
reference leak fix, so if you play around with current pygobject git head, you really also have to use the current GTK+ git head.
Speaking of which, if you want to port applications and always stay on top of the pygobject/GTK development without having to clutter your package system with make install s of those, it works very well to have this in your ~/.bashrc:
export GI_TYPELIB_PATH=$HOME/projects/gtk/gtk:$HOME/projects/gtk/gdk
export PYTHONPATH=$HOME/projects/pygobject
Better GVariant/GDBus support
The GNOME world is moving from the old dbus-glib python bindings to GDBus, which is integrated into GLib. However, dbus-python exposed a really nice and convenient way of doing D-Bus calls, while using GDBus from Python was hideously complicated, especially for
nontrivial arguments with empty or nested arrays:
from gi.repository import Gio, GLib
from gi._gi import variant_type_from_string
d = Gio.bus_get_sync(Gio.BusType.SESSION, None)
notify = Gio.DBusProxy.new_sync(d, 0, None, 'org.freedesktop.Notifications',
'/org/freedesktop/Notifications', 'org.freedesktop.Notifications', None)
vb = GLib.VariantBuilder()
vb.init(variant_type_from_string('r'))
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('s', 'test'))
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('u', 1))
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('s', 'gtk-ok'))
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('s', 'Hello World!'))
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('s', 'Subtext'))
# add an empty array
eavb = GLib.VariantBuilder()
eavb.init(variant_type_from_string('as'))
vb.add_value(eavb.end())
# add an empty dict
eavb = GLib.VariantBuilder()
eavb.init(variant_type_from_string('a sv '))
vb.add_value(eavb.end())
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('i', 10000))
args = vb.end()
result = notify.call_sync('Notify', args, 0, -1, None)
id = result.get_child_value(0).get_uint32()
print id
So I went to making the GLib.Variant constructor work properly with
nested types and
boxed variants, adding
Pythonic GVariant iterators and indexing (so that you can treat GVariant dictionaries/arrays/tuples just like their Python equivalents), and finally a
Variant.unpack() method for converting the return value of a D-Bus call back into a native Python data type. This looks a lot friendlier now:
from gi.repository import Gio, GLib
d = Gio.bus_get_sync(Gio.BusType.SESSION, None)
notify = Gio.DBusProxy.new_sync(d, 0, None, 'org.freedesktop.Notifications',
'/org/freedesktop/Notifications', 'org.freedesktop.Notifications', None)
args = GLib.Variant('(susssasa sv i)', ('test', 1, 'gtk-ok', 'Hello World!',
'Subtext', [], , 10000))
result = notify.call_sync('Notify', args, 0, -1, None)
id = result.unpack()[0]
print id
I also prepared another patch in
GNOME#640181 which will provide the icing on the cake, i. e. handle the variant building/unpacking transparently and make the explicit call_sync() unnecessary:
from gi.repository import Gio, GLib
d = Gio.bus_get_sync(Gio.BusType.SESSION, None)
notify = Gio.DBusProxy.new_sync(d, 0, None, 'org.freedesktop.Notifications',
'/org/freedesktop/Notifications', 'org.freedesktop.Notifications', None)
result = notify.Notify('(susssasa sv i)', 'test', 1, 'gtk-ok', 'Hello World!',
'Subtext', [], , 10000)
print result[0]
I hope that I can get this reviewed and land this soon.
Thanks to our sponsors!
Many thanks to the
GNOME Foundation and
Collabora for sponsoring this event!
Debian Med Bioinformatics Sprint
Last weekend, I was at the
Debian Med Meeting in Travem nde near L beck, thanks to
an invitation by Steffen M ller and Andreas Tille.
It was a great opportunity to finally meet Steffen and some
of the other bioinformatics people in Debian like Manuel
Prinz face-to-face for the first time. Also, lots of
upstream and related bioinformatics packagers from e.g. Biolinux
were present as well, many of them from the UK.
I discussed with and helped some people about Debian
packaging. There is a big push to get Debian packages done
and integrated in Debian and Ubuntu, but often enough people
are not exactly sure what the requirements are and what
needs to be done. Hopefully, the sprint was successful to
clear things up and move forward.
I also managed to finalize the initial Jmol packaging and
uploaded it to Debian towards the end of the sprint. I plan
to update the other bioinformatics related packages in
debichem like pymol and
openbabel as
soon as squeeze is released.
Overall, it was a great weekend, many thanks to NERC and Debian for making
it possible, and to Steffen M ller for organizing it!
For those of you who follow me through anything other than 
This release is "slightly" delayed due to lots of physics calculations for my final PhD year at the TU Vienna with all fixes that piled up since last summer: Support for newer GNU make 3.82, x86_32 signal fun, the self explantory KBUILD_REPRODUCIBLE and various cleanups: For details see 
For some years now I have kept a private journal, sort of a private blog.
It is mainly related to my work and hobby development activities,
though some private life gets poured into it as well.
It's a private journal. It is not meant for others to read. It has
a dual purpose in life:
Debian's 
The family of 
I haven't seen this widely publicised yet, so just to help make sure people know: Linux Conf AU 2011 is going ahead in Brisbane next week, but due to the flooding it's been moved to the QUT Kelvin Grove campus about 4KM north of the original venue. There are good bus links between it and the CBD. More details 
Last night was the last time I came back from a pub with my clothes
stinking due to tobacco smoke. The Spanish congress has finally approved a
real anti-smoking law which will ban smoking on public areas, with no
exceptions or ways to workaround the ban. Starting on January 2nd, the
Spanish state will be a smoke-free region (or mostly, it seems it'll be
permitted in open-air events like football stadiums or bullrings, and I
don't think that will be a great problem for me, specially the latter).
For years, my intolerance to smoke has been increasing and I'm really
expectant to see the benefits of this law in my habits. After more than 30
years dealing with smoke around us, it's our turn now. I've been speaking
to a few barmans. In general they seem worried this will affect their
business, but I can't see how it will. Spain has a big culture for having
mid-morning almuerzos in bars, and people are not going to give
that up due to not being able to smoke. They will just do it after they
get out, not during the coffee, and that's it. The barmans of the two bars
I visit most are non-smokers, but have to breath the smoke of hundreds of
cigarretes every day, and can't do anything about it. Until tomorrow, when
this will end and everyone will have a right to breath better air. I hope
this kind of legislation continues to be adopted throughout Europe, because
the FOSDEM welcome party is probably the next smoke horror I'll have to face
soonish. :)
