[PyKDE] PyKDE2 Announcement

[Jim Bublitz]

With assistance from Phil Thompson, I've been working on PyKDE2. I've basically
been doing the more or less mechanical generation of *.sip files, and have just
sent the first batch to Phil. Phil or someone else more competent than I am with
SIP (that's a hint that volunteers would be appreciated) will be completing the
more involved parts. I don't want to be overly optimistic, but I expect PyKDE2
should appear, if only in an alpha form, sometime in the next several months.

Progress to date:

1. kdecore, kdeui, and a new dcop module are about 95% complete and sent to
Phil. I have actually run a small .py application using these, so we do have
running code, but the remaining 5% to be completed includes some significant
methods. As usual, the last 5% will probably take more time and effort than the
first 95%.

2. kio (another new module) and kfile (depends on kio) should be ready to send
to Phil sometime next week - the *.sip files are all complete in a "first pass"
fashion, but still need some cleanup and there are a few minor compilation
issues with the generated cpp code. The modules in (1) and (2) represent (IMHO)
the absolute minimum for a usable PyKDE2.

3. I expect to also produce modules for kab, khtmlw (hopefully everything,
which is *a lot*), kspell, and new module for kparts. The kfm module is
obsolete.

4. PyKDE2 is a much larger (and hopefully richer) API than PyKDE1, and is
forcing some upgrades to SIP and PyQt, and creating some issues that need to be
resolved in the build and distribution areas. Just a couple of the problem
areas: use of "namespace" which SIP doesn't currently support (I have a kludged
workaround, but Phil will probably add support to SIP); some required k*.h
files are not in the KDE binary distribution, but are only in the KDE source
distribution.

At the moment the build process is not very clean, so I don't expect CVS to be
available for a while (that's Phil's call). There will be a lot of code for
this, so testers/bug fixers will be greatly appreciated once things are
released. If you want to help prior to release, respond to the mailing list or
to Phil.

If you want to prepare for using this, I expect you will need Python 2.1,
Qt2.3.0 and KDE 2.1.1 or 2.1.2. The KDE ClassRef documentation is also
available somewhere on www.kde.org (developer section?), and is also necessary.

Phil or I will update to the mailing list as needed.

Jim