[Python-apps-team] Spe's Debian packaging feedback

[Stani's Python Editor]

Hi Stefano and Emilio!

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort schreef:
> Hello Stani!
> 
> Stefano and I have been working on Spe to update it in Debian. 
I have noticed and I am very thankfull! Don't hesitate to contact me for 
anything.
> We are going to
> maintain it in the Python Applications Packaging Team:
> http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/PythonAppsPackagingTeam
Great! I also recently joined that team. I prefer to focus on 
developping SPE and Phatch but want to give all my support for packaging 
and fixing things upstream where needed.
> 
> While working on it, we have done some things which would be useful for you to
> have in the source tree. Having them on your side would also mean that more
> people would benefit from them.
Nice!
> 
> Stefano has created a manpage.   And we have a .desktop file from the old
> packaging. I'm attaching them to this mail.
What would be the appropiate place to put them? In a debian folder?
> 
> There's also the problem with wxGlade, kiki, winpdb, pychecker... All of those
> modules are developed externally, and thus we believe it's a good idea not to
> have them included in the source tree, as that means there will be no benefits
> from bug fixes and improvements in those packages. So that's why are removing
> them (wxGlade, kiki and winpdb at this moment) from the binary package, and
> linking to those modules, which are available externally. This means less
> maintenance work for us, and of course for you! So we would like to have your
> opinion on the matter. Would it be possible for you to remove them from your
> source tree? Specially wxGlade, which is big, but probably the rest too.
I started developing SPE on Windows. As Windows doesn't have a nice 
packaging system as linux does, I included all of them as I wanted 
everything to run out of the box. Quite soon some linux users jumped 
into the spe source code and started to fix SPE for linux. Later the 
same happened for the Mac. Now I also use Linux and hardly touch 
Windows. However as spe users are cross-platform, the majority still 
uses Windows and I don't want to drop support for them. I know they 
prefer everything out of the box. As a linux user I agree that for linux 
it is better to strip them out of the release tarball. So for the sake 
of all spe users I will release two versions of spe: the normal one 
without plugins and one with all the extras.
Concerning wxGlade, I have contacted the packager and asked him to 
update the package. He did, but now it is probably waiting approval 
somewhere to get pushed into the repository. I was wondering if the name 
of the package python-wxglade suggests it is a library, while it is an 
application?
With winpdb there  is a small issue. As the winpdb upstream doesn't 
contain an __init__.py file. SPE can not know where it is located and 
SPE needs to import modules of winpdb for its interaction. I always 
added an empty __init__.py myself. Probably you have a more elegant 
solution.
> 
> Also, we don't know what to do with pychecker. From plugins/pychecker2/NOTES.txt
> I see that pychecker2 is a rewrite of pychecker, but it doesn't seem to be
> available externally. I've found the original pychecker in the net, and we have
> it packaged in Debian, but I can't find any pychecker2. Did you rewrite it
> yourself? And, is Spe using pychecker2, pychecker, or both? I'd like to get rid
> of it too, but I'm not sure it's safe to do it and link to pychecker's package
> because of the rewrite. Any guidance on this would be more than appreciate.
pychecker and pychecker2 are standard packages of pychecker. They are 
not written by me. However I had to modify some lines of them as 
otherwise I was not able to make them interoperate with spe. This has 
been a while back. If you want, I can digg it up.
> 
> I know removing those plugins from the source tree would mean removing some
> functionality from the IDE, but aren't they plugins? So I'd suggest you making
> them optional. If the user has them installed, then they will work. Otherwise,
> they can't be used. What do you think?
For me it is totally ok to make them external, but I rather prefer not 
to have them optional. Most people who use spe, use and expect the 
debugger. Making them optional also means quite some changes to the spe 
code in order to make all the menu and toolbar icons optional or make 
them display a warning "please install...". Right now I am finalising a 
public release and don't want to delay it further.
> 
> I've made a patch which removes the hashbangs from imported scripts. Could you
> please apply it if it's ok? (attached).
I will look into it.
> 
> Stefano has also worked on a setup.py distutils script, although as we have
> removed kiki, wxGlade... we want to know what do you think about it to remove
> those from the setup.py too (in fact I already did it, but it's our svn
> repository so the one with those plugins is publicly available).
I have a setup.py script which is heavily orientated to windows. I look 
how I can best use it.
> 
> Finally, we would appreciate a lot if you could make a tarball whenever you do a
> public release!
A public release is not far away. Actually the whole blender python 
scripting support for spe got a big facelift and I need to do some more 
tests in order not to have a cascade of releases within days. I hope to 
keep good contact with the python app team so releasing spe can be as 
smooth as possible in the future. I hope we can reduce the amount of 
patches for debian to a minimum by fixing things as much as possible 
upstream.

 > That would help us a lot. And as minor request, renaming
> spe_changes.txt to ChangeLog and using it would be nice (the last entry is from
> 0.7.4!) and possibly a README.
Sounds good to me.
> 
> I Look forward to hearing from you!
As Stefano mailed me already before, I wanted to answer as quickly as 
possible. I will look more into the files you've sent.

Stani

PS. A bit off topic, you can skip this...
Right now I am developing also a new application phatch (photo batch 
processor with a nice gui) http://photobatch.stani.be It lets you 
watermark, rotate, resize, apply rounded corners, shadows, ... thousands 
of photos with just one click. To write your own plugins you only need 
to know python & pil as phatch generates automatically all the user 
interface with international support 
https://translations.launchpad.net/phatch/trunk/+pots/phatch. I hope to 
get it in debian too. The structure of the source tarball as you will 
see is quite debian friendly.