Status report 'Refactoring Deskbar-Applet' 28.05.2007

[Sebastian Pösterl <marduk k-d-w org>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Blog post is available at:
http://www.k-d-w.org/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=13&cntnt01returnid=15

This week I spend a lot of time working on Deskbar-Applet. First of all,
I continued on implementing the Core functions. Now that the core was
almost finished I started working on the GUI part. First of all, I
designed interfaces for the view and the controller (according to MVC).
I decided to get the Window UI working first. Additionally, it's the UI
that most likely will still be available in 2.20. It's now possible to
search and to select a result. In addition, I added completion for the
entry, just to see how it would look like.

It took more time for me to adjust the match class in order to get
pickling working without hacks. Therefore, I had to remove the reference
to the handler it belongs to and the Pixbuf. The icon must be provided
as a string now (e.g. a stock name or a filename). There's still a
problem with the Mozilla module, though. Sometimes it retrieves a
filename and sometimes a Pixbuf. The handler is that complex and weird
that I couldn't find out how it works, yet.

Moreover, the changes I made on the match class involved changes on the
history format. Instead of a pseudo timestamp a real one is used now.
Actually, I'm not sure if the history thing really works, Sometimes
Deskbar freezes on startup and the history file is reset, I have to
investigate that. Finally, the awesome python module logging[1] made it
very easy to replace print statements with logging calls.

In the future the results should be ordered by priority and all query
calls should be async. I gave the latter a try, but some weird things
happened. I guess I have make sure that everything is thread-safe. I
also want to bind the shortcut using gnome-control-center[2]. In order
to try that I need the newest GNOME development environment. So I gave
Jhbuild a try and sticked to the Smoketesting guide[3]. Compiling worked
fine, but if I try to log in I get an error about bonobo complaining
that the panel couldn't be registered. I appreciate any help here.

If you're brave and very interested can check out the Subversion repository.

I won't have that much time next week, because an exam is coming closer.

P.S.: Thanks Raphael for answering all the questions I had last week.

[1]: http://docs.python.org/lib/module-logging.html
[2]: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=410758
[3]: http://live.gnome.org/Smoketesting
- --
Greetings,
Sebastian Pölsterl
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFGWt731ygZeJ3lLIcRAlQTAJ0XzGjHooDld8taDv7NLmo7N567+QCfboQj
DDc+l3+pbDK66Fe80OzHD44=
=NRUH
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----