[PyKDE] PyKDE 3.16.0 released

[Jim Bublitz]

The PyKDE 3.16.0 release should be available at riverbankcomputing.co.uk in 
the near future (I understand Phil has some repairs to do there, and has been 
out of town as well, so it may take a day or two - or not).

Changes are (some already available in earlier snapshots):

- support for KDE through 3.5.3
- restored support for konsolepart, but only for KDE >= 3.5.0
- DCOP extensions fix (thanks to Matthias Panzenbock)
- KConfigSkeletonFix (thanks to Michael Franz Aigner)
- pykde_sampler (in examples directory - thanks to Troy Melhase)
- configure.py now automatically detects lib64 for kdelibs
- numerous small fixes related to versioning and automatic sip file generation

PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING:

Requirements
==========

**** This version REQUIRES sip >= 4.4.0, PyQt >= 3.16.0 and Qt >= 3.2.0. ****

If someone has a problem with those requirements, I can make an older release 
available. It becomes increasingly time-consuming to support older software 
versions.

I haven't tried Python 2.5 yet, but don't expect any problems (please post if 
you build against Python 2.5, successfully or not - otherwise, I'll test it 
eventually). 

I have built PyKDE successfully against the latest sip snapshot.

KDE version support
==============

I've fixed the tools that generate PyKDE, so support for KDE 3.5.3 *could* 
have been done automatically end-to-end. Support for KDE 3.5.4 should be very 
simple to do, and there will probably be a PyKDE 3.16.1 within a week or two 
(including bug fixes from this release).

I have backtested against KDE 3.5.x and 3.4.x (several versions of each) and
KDE 3.1.4. I apparently wiped my partitions with 3.2 and 3.3, and don't plan 
to rebuild those, so I haven't tested there. However, with bug fixes in code 
generation, this version is very clean as far as previous KDE versions, and 
if bugs do pop up, I'll be happy to fix them. I was going to test against KDE 
3.0.x, but the distribution is so old it would have been a lot of work to get 
a current sip/PyQt/PyKDE set working there. If there are problems with older 
versions, I'll fix them (assuming you meet the sip/PyQt/Qt requirements 
above)

Again, older versions that will work against all previous KDE 3.x.x versions 
are available.

There shouldn't be any problems with Python source code written against 
earlier PyKDE or KDE versions.

konsolePart
========

I thought the problems with this on KDE 3.4.x were just a few missing symbols 
in libkonsolepart, however, after further investigation (and my own 
amazement) it appears that the SuSE builds of libkonsolepart for KDE 3.4.x 
don't have ANY of the symbols needed to support libkonsolepart - I'm not sure 
how that works. I can't speak for other distributions, but I have no way to 
build this for KDE 3.4 and so can't support it (and it would make PyKDE 
unbuildable for SuSE users using KDE 3.4 as far as I can tell).

It builds and installs for KDE >= 3.5.0, so I've set it up that way. If you 
need it for KDE < 3.5.0 and have a working libkonsolepart, it's fairly easy 
to modify PyKDE to make it available for you (but not generally). I'll post 
instructions if anyone wants them.

I also have no experience with this code and no way to actually test it, so I 
would appreciate some testing and example code contributions from users who 
want this feature.

pykde_sampler
==========

This is a cool widget and other feature demo from Troy Melhase. It currently 
only supports a few widgets and could use extending - if you want to 
contribute, this is a good place to start.

Other Bugs
========

There are some outstanding problems with importing KParts and with 
KGlobalAccel that will take a lot more time to dig into, so I've postpone 
those for now. I expect a lot of stuff from KDE3 (including PyKDE bugs) will 
carryover to KDE4, so I do expect to address these as time is available.

As usual, bug reports, feature suggestions and other comments are solicited 
and encouraged. And thanks again to all those who contributed code, 
suggestions, bug reports, questions and other stuff on this list.

Jim