[PyKDE] PyKDE-3.11rc1 release

[Jim Bublitz]

PyKDE-3.11rc1 should be available at 
http://riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pykde shortly. I still need to 
send Phil an update to the PyKDE web pages there.

Requirements: 

sip3.10.1 or sip4 (20040504 snapshot or a later snapshot or 
release - earlier snapshots or 4.0rc3 will NOT work), PyQt-3.11 
or a later snapshot or release, Python2.2.2 or later (earlier 
versions may work but haven't been tested), KDE3.0.0 - 3.2.2. 

Building: 

I've tested on SuSE (8.1-9.0), RH (9.0) and Mandrake (9.0-9.2), 
using KDE 3.0.3, several 3.1.x versions, and 3.2.2. The docs 
(html in doc/ directory) cover the changes in command line 
switches. 

The only major difference between this release and alpha7 is that 
as with PyQt the full set of sip files is now copied somewhere - 
the default is /usr/share/sip.  This provides a set of files in 
a known location for Python bindings that want to import PyKDE. 
Since there are none of those at present, you can delete those 
files if you need the disk space (about 1.6MB).  I may provide a 
switch to suppress copying later.

General: 

KSharedPixmap is disabled, but still in the docs. That's because 
if you really want it, you can make it work with 3.10.1 (not 
easily however), but I wasn't able to get it working with sip4. 
The inheritance structure for this class is ambiguous. sip3 
required patching of the sip generated code, but I didn't find 
an easy way to do that with sip4 (the code is quite different). 
I might do some more work on this, but it has a low priority 
(unless someone really needs KSharedPixmap).

I finally remembered to fix DCOPClient. DCOPClient.call, 
DCOPClient.callAsync (>= KDE3.2.0), and one or two other methods 
should now work correctly.  For example, in C++ DCOPClient.call 
returns results through references in the arg list; in Python it 
takes a shorter arg list and returns a tuple (see the docs for 
specifics). I want to look into DCOP more and provide some 
example code. Marshalling args seems to be the tricky part.

kjs is optional (by default not built); kmdi is added 
(>=KDE3.2.0)

The docs begin in the doc/ subdirectory and are only in HTML. The 
classref docs no longer link to KDE docs. There is no longer a 
separate viewer. I just noticed I forgot to include images with 
the docs - I'll add those for the final release.

QXEmbed is included again - there's an example program from Troy 
Melhase in examples/, along with a kmdi example from him as well 
(thanks!).

Except for undiscovered bugs, I consider this release to be 
complete - it's feature complete anyway. Compiling against sip4 
throws a lot of warnings - I don't believe any of those are a 
problem, but will try to eliminate as many as possible (some of 
the unused or uninitialized variable stuff may persist).

I'd appreciate hearing whether it works or not with platforms I 
haven't tested - Mdk 10, SuSE 9.1, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, 
etc.

Jim