GNUe Traffic #66 For 1 Feb 2003

By Peter Sullivan

Table Of Contents

• Standard Format
• Text Format
• XML Source
• Introduction
• Threads Covered

  1.	23 Jan 2003		New release of Double Chocco Latte
  2.	27 Jan 2003		Text Encoding in Common
  3.	27 Jan 2003		Gadfly database driver for GNUe
  4.	27 Jan 2003		Modal forms in wxPython and GTK
  5.	28 Jan 2003		Passing parameters to Forms
  6.	29 Jan 2003		Problems with wxPython 2.4 and Designer

Introduction

This Cousin covers the three main mailing lists for the GNU Enterprise (http://www.gnuenterprise.org) project, plus the #gnuenterprise IRC channel. Kernel Cousins GNUe is now group-authored: if you'd like to join the team, let us know (mailto:psu@burdonvale.co.uk) .

1. New release of Double Chocco Latte

23 Jan 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 23 Jan 2003"

Topics: DCL

People: Derek Neighbors, Jeff Bailey, Andrew Mitchell, Daniel Baumann, Peter Sullivan

Derek Neighbors (revDeke) noted that a "new dcl 0.9 is out" . He asked Jeff Bailey (jbailey) "if you can grab the tarball and package for debian and get in sid it would be great" . Jeff asked "Are you planning a quick string of releases? I want to do a bunch of changes" to the Debian packaging "to add the ability to setup the site automatically in apache." . Derek said "we had a few features we planned for 0.9.1 - so i see at least an 0.9.1 coming - maybe a 0.9.1 and 0.9.2" .

Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) asked "why is dcl still on" sourceforge? Derek said "we will get it off sourceforge soon enough - in due time" . DCL would eventually be set up as a project on savannah (GNU's free fork of sourceforge) but "im not ready to create one yet - ultimately it would be nice to have dcl part of gnue i think instead of a 'separate' project - but thats a different dicussion" .

Daniel Baumann (chillywilly) asked "what another subdir nder gnue dir?" Andrew felt "another module would be nice" . Peter Sullivan (psu) said that he thought the GNUe project was "in 2 minds on modules - as one way of re-organising to fit better on savannah would be to split the repository & have seperate projects for forms, reports, appserver etc" . Daniel agreed - "and then a gnue-all or gnue module that combine them all" . Peter saud this would make "who-does-what & security easier - but at possible cost of loss of co-ordination" . Daniel did not think so, as "most developers would checkout gnue[-all]" - "this is how several projects do it - like gstreamer for instance" .

2. Text Encoding in Common

27 Jan 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 27 Jan 2003"

Topics: Common, Forms

People: Bajusz Tamás, Arturas Kriukovas, Dmitry Sorokin, ra3vat, Dmitry Sorokin

Bajusz Tamás (btami) asked people to "test the latest CVS a bit, i'v introduced "textEncoding" into [common] in gnue.conf instead of formFontEncoding" , as previously discussed in Issue #56, Section #10  (13 Nov 2002: i18n in GNUe) . This would allow all of the GNUe tools, not just Forms, to use international character sets. Arturas Kriukovas (Arturas) reported "it refused to work (tried to hit me with errors and tracebacks) with default textEncoding value (iso8859-1), but when i changed it to my native encoding (iso8859-13) it worked just fine" . Tamás thought "i think some more error checking is needed in GBaseApp.py - todo: if encoding of *.po is different from default (iso8859-1) msg to user to change textEncoding in gnue.conf" . Dmitry Sorokin (ra3vat) said "encoding in .po is separate thing - my changes was done for that - to have one .po file to two platform with different default encoding (and encoding in gnue.conf)" Tamás noted that it did not matter if the encodings were different, as long as they did not actually conflict.

3. Gadfly database driver for GNUe

27 Jan 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 27 Jan 2003"

Topics: Common

People: Andrew Mitchell, Perry Lorier

Further to Issue #48, Section #2  (18 Sep 2002: Gadfly database driver for GNUe) Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) explained that gadfly was a "simple 'database', done in python, can't recall if it requires python modules or not - supports a decent subset of SQL - tables stored separately in it's own format, afaik" . It was standalone - it could either run as a seperate process or (more normally) as a library. He "can't recall what state the GNUe driver is in, if you're wanting to use that" . Perry Lorier (Isomer) said he was trying to find a very simple database for a friend who "wanted to write a program to keep track of marks for a course at university" - postgreSQL or MySQL would be overkill for something like this. Andrew agreed - "that's one reason why i looked at gadfly - the other was that it was there :)"

4. Modal forms in wxPython and GTK

27 Jan 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 27 Jan 2003"

Topics: Forms, Common

People: Marcos Dione, James Thompson

Marcos Dione (StyXman) had "been poking w/ the idea of modal forms. specially" with the wxPython user interface (UI) driver. "I couldn't make them modal. setModal is for wxDialogs. MakeModal is not implemented, nor Capture/ReleaseMouse (which were my last resort)" . However, he did not expect to have the same problems with the native GTK UI driver. James Thompson (jamest) said that he would be looking at this soon "as looking at the UI changes needed I decided it was good time to clean up the UI drivers - so I'll be trying to bring gtk, qt, and wx up to speed at same time - and not go insane :)"

5. Passing parameters to Forms

28 Jan 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 28 Jan 2003"

Topics: Forms

People: Marcos Dione

Further to Issue #46, Section #20  (8 Sep 2002: Passing parameters to Forms) , Marcos Dione (StyXman) said he had coded this so that, if parameters were supplied "then pass the parameters, else, call as usual" - this involved the least change/overhead to the existing code base. He also "got forms returninga values."

6. Problems with wxPython 2.4 and Designer

29 Jan 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 29 Jan 2003"

People: Andrew Mitchell, Dave Francella, Bajusz Tamás

Dave Francella (frayed), after some effort, got wxPython and wxGTK working together, but GNUe Designer would not start. He pasted his error message to the #flood IRC channel. Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) said "hmm that is a real odd error - it would only happen if string wasn't imported" Dave said he was using the 0.4.2 releases. Andrew suggested "ok, the first non-commented line, can you add string to the list of imported modules?" Dave did so, and got an error message "global name 'string' is not defined" - he was using python 2.2.1. Andrew was able to replicate the error with a set-up of his own that had previously worked "but upgraded wxpython :)" Bajusz Tamás (btami) confirmed that, previously, wxPython had done an import for python's 'string' module, so the GNUe code had not needed to - but in wxPython "2.4 it was removed" . He had fixed the CVS version of GNUe to now "import string" explicitly for itself, but this meant that all prior "released GNUe versions are '"incompatible" with 2.4" , including the 0.5.0 pre-release candidates. Andrew suggested putting an advisory on the web site.

Sharon And Joy