[PyKDE] PyKDE - almost

[Jim Bublitz]

Despite the temperature being 35-40C all of last week - it cools 
down nicely at night, but my office was quite warm by late 
afternoon, and my computer doesn't work when the CPU temperature 
hits 81C - and an 8 hour power outage last night[1], PyKDE for 
KDE312/sip3.6/sip3.7 is coming along.  KDE311 builds against 3.6 
and 3.7 with no changes; I'm just finishing the final test build 
for KDE312/sip 3.6 and expect no problems going to sip 3.7. I 
want to test building against earlier KDE versions and then 
package it, so I hope to have it available by Wednesday, and 
certainly no later than the end of the week.

Requirements
==========

sip 3.6 **or** sip 3.7
PyQt >= 3.0
KDE >= 3.0
1.5.2 <= Python <= 2.2.2 (2.3 is untested - should work)

Note that I've now dropped support for KDE2 (I indicated this 
would happen about six months ago) and Phil will be dropping Qt2 
support in the future, so I'd just as soon get this over with 
now - it saves a couple days of build testing as the computers 
still running KDE2 are old and slow (but then so am I).

I've only tested on SuSE 8.2 (gcc 3.3) so far and haven't had any 
problems. I'll hit some earlier gcc versions with the earlier 
KDE3 versions. I have RH9.1 and Mdk 9.1, but not installed - 
I'll postpone testing against those until after this release.

I haven't installed Python 2.3 yet, but will get around to that 
after the release. I don't expect problems there, unless sip or 
PyQt are having problems as well.

I've tested KDE311 and 312 against sip 3.6 and they build fine. 
All other tests will be against sip 3.7.

Bugs and Patches
=============

I've only patched PyKDE far enough to work with sip 3.6 and sip 
3.7. There are a bunch of bug reports and patches pending from 
the list (Pete's SMP patch, a bunch of stuff Gordon Tyler worked 
on, and some other stuff). I'll be getting to that next (after 
the release). I expect to do a release every week or two for a 
while, so packagers might want to be aware of that. The 
numbering will be of the form PyKDE-3.7-X, where X = 1, 2, 3 ...

The example programs work; there are unit tests for most of the 
handwritten code - 3 fail (worked previously) One fails because 
the method it's testing is obsolete and I haven't updated yet. 
The other two failures are on methods not likely to be used by 
anybody, so I'll put those off a while too. For one, Python 
can't find the method ("missing attribute") and for the other, 
the return value is empty, despite identical code on similar 
methods still working fine. I'll try to remember to identify 
these in BUGS - I did verify that they're actual failures (not 
incorrect tests).

UPDATE: The KDE311 'return value' failure works with KDE312. 
Don't ask me why - it's the same code. Both might be KDE or SuSE 
problems.

Other
====

There are a few other minor rough spots but they have workarounds 
in place. The docs are essentially unchanged from KDE311, so I 
probably won't update those for the initial release.

build.py will no longer require the '-l' switch (KDE3 requires 
libqt-mt) but will include a test for libqt-mt. I'll also 
probably make the -c switch the default and require a '-c-' to 
disable it (-c concatenates all of the source files for each 
module into a single huge cpp file that compiles about 80% 
faster, but requires 128MB or more of RAM to be useful). The 
current basic command line:

    python build.py -lqt-mt -c

will still work. -lqt however will cause an error, and only -c- 
will have an effect, and 'python build.py' will work the same as 
the command line above.

As always, check the README and ChangeLog.


Jim

[1] My servers had been up 459 days 12 hours when I had to shut 
them down. Ugh.