[Weekly report] Week 6: Conduit

[Alexandre <airmind gmail com>]

I'm finally away from my college, but with a few papers due last week
and the trip to my parent's house meant I didnt do much this week
other then think about the project.

I decided not to resume last week's work on the Account Manager right
away. I took a look at the Coisas source code and it has a good
example of how to use the Gnome Keyring with Python, which will be
very useful for me and something I could not find anywhere else.
However I want to work on the GUI before I commit more time into the
Account Editor, because now my idea is to work on a DBus-only GUI for
Conduit. The reason for this is that using the DBus API to access
Conduit we get some very useful flexibility. The greatest one is to be
able to separate conduits into separate processes, so we can get away
from the problems caused by Python threads (non-cancellable threads,
blocked by external calls and not able to support more cores). But in
order to do it, we need a way to communicate to these separate
processes, which is not entirely possible with the current GUI. So if
this works out, each conduit will be it's own separate process
(created with the multiprocessing module) that will export it's own
DBus API, all controlled by a daemon which is the current application
without the GUI.
By writing a new GUI using only DBus we also get a better feeling
where our API is missing and we get to fix some long-lasting problems
with our UI.

My parent's ISP seems to be blocking SSH access, which is driving me
crazy. I'll call them this week but in the meantime I wont be able to
push my changes into my branch.

Alexandre Rosenfeld