FLOSS Project Planets

October is always an important month for Python, as this is when a new major version is released. Python 3.13 is the new version this year, and it brings several new features that lay the groundwork for other changes in the future. As one version of Python comes to life, another is put to rest. Python 3.8 is already five years old, which means that this version won’t be supported any longer.

There are also exciting developments happening in the wider Python community. In this newsletter, you can read about Polars’ improved support for plotting, as well as how Django developers gathered for the annual DjangoCon US conference.

Time to jump in and read about what’s happening in the world of Python!

Python 3.13 Release Slightly Delayed

The release of Python 3.13, the newest version of Python, was originally scheduled for October 1, 2024. However, a few days before that date, release manager Thomas Wouters decided to postpone the release until October 7, 2024:

I’m a little concerned with the impact of the incremental GC change in 3.13, which recently showed up. It’s not clear that the incremental GC provides significant improvements (although the smaller pauses are probably desirable), it clearly has slightly more overhead in common cases, and we’re still discovering pathological cases.

I don’t think we should release 3.13.0 with the incremental GC. (Source)

The incremental garbage collector was a small improvement slated for Python 3.13. In many cases, the new garbage collection algorithm improves performance. Unfortunately, it was found to slow down Python significantly in some rare cases.

As a result, the core developers decided to revert the implementation and use the traditional garbage collector in Python 3.13. At the same time, the new implementation is being scrutinized and currently the goal is to include incremental garbage collection in Python 3.14.

Delaying a major Python release is never an easy choice. However, erring on the side of caution is a good approach, and it’s great to see that the Python 3.13 release is being handled responsibly.

Python 3.13 Highlights

As always, a new Python release brings many improvements and new features. You can explore these in-depth in Python 3.13: Cool New Features for You to Try. In particular, the new release includes:

• A brand new interactive interpreter (REPL)
• Colored tracebacks and improved error messages
• A separate, free-threaded version of Python that runs without the global interpreter lock (GIL)
• An experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler
• Several improvements to Python’s static type system

For free threading and the JIT compiler, you need to compile Python with special build flags. Read Python 3.13 Preview: Free Threading and a JIT Compiler to learn more about how to explore these two new features. Additionally, Python 3.13 Preview: A Modern REPL provides more detail on the new REPL.

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/python-news-october-2024/ »

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DrupalCon week! On Monday, we landed the last issue to achieve the 0.1 milestone: The XB annotations and labels should not change size when zooming — thanks Utkarsh “utkarsh_33”, Atul “soaratul” Dubey and Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri for guiding it across the finish line!

That was the only noteworthy commit of the week, because of Acquia’s team working full-time on Experience Builder (XB), Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins, Jesse “jessebaker” Baker, Lauri “lauriii” Timmanee and Bálint (he helped us achieve 0.1 on Monday and traveled on Tuesday!) were attending DrupalCon. Also at DrupalCon was Dave “longwave” Long, who we’re sponsoring part time.

So it was with a lot of satisfaction that I tagged the 0.1.0-alpha1 release on the morning of the DriesNote :)

Not at DrupalCon: research mode

With roughly half of the team at DrupalCon this week, and with 0.1.0 done, the rest of us pivoted to preparing for the next milestone: 0.2.0. Many technical details need to be figured out for the next batch of product requirements that Lauri prioritized (together with Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein).

We started research on:

• #3475672: auto-saving, drafts, and all possible ways to achieve that, led by Ted “tedbow” Bowman and with the much-needed help of both Travis “traviscarden” Carden and Dave
• #3475363: in-UI (JS) component creation Proof-of-Concept using StackBlitz by Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang and (newly joined!) Xinran “xinran” Cao, led by Alex
• #3475584: blocks-as-XB-components, led by Feliksas “f.mazeikis” Mazeikis and with the help of Dave and I, while reusing and building on top of the work that Lee “larowlan” Rowlands did ~2 months ago
• #3446434: Document “Semi-Coupled Theme Engine” and “Redux-integrated Field Widgets” components, kickstarted by me, because we proved this can work but now it’s time to mature this; this will be led by Ben, with again input from Dave 1

XB data model meeting — 50/50 remote & in-person

During DrupalCon, Lauri, Ted, Alex, I met with with core committers Alex Pott, catch and Dave met to discuss XB’s JSON-based data storage model that XB currently implements. We’re not yet fully aligned (catch pointed out the search index aspect is important to support — the question is how to support that without compromising the UX Lauri envisions), but the discussion is much clearer today than it was in June, because there’s now concrete code to point to. That removed a lot of confusion on both “sides” (we’re all on the same side: we want the brightest future for Drupal!).

The meeting we had during DrupalCon led to:

1. Alex Bronstein identifying a possible alternative implementation that would meet both the original goals, and address most concerns: #3477428: Refactor the XB field type to be multi-valued, to de-jsonify the tree, and to reference the field_union type of the prop values.
2. Me unpostponing the #3467870: Support {type: array, …} prop shapes issue and pushing it forward. First making this work would help prevent #3477428 (see prior point) going in a direction that would make it impossible to support type: array Single Directory Component (SDC) props, which should be represented by multi-value fields (fields configured for multiple cardinality). I made the back-end pieces work during DrupalCon, but to make it work end-to-end additional infrastructure on the client side is needed first. For that: see the last “research” bullet above.

Missed a prior week? See all posts tagged Experience Builder.

Goal: make it possible to follow high-level progress by reading ~5 minutes/week. I hope this empowers more people to contribute when their unique skills can best be put to use!

For more detail, join the #experience-builder Slack channel. Check out the pinned items at the top!

Presentations at DrupalCon

Of course, Dries included and demonstrated Experience Builder 0.1.0 during the DriesNote:

The XB section of the DriesNote starts at 50:44.

Lauri talked about what’s been happening with XB and what will happen next:

Many of the things Lauri shared with all of you had only been seen by Lauri, not by anybody else! :D

After his session, Lauri had many hallway conversations that increased our conviction that we’re on the right track with XB! :)

And in my humble opinion the most inspiring — Ben’s session about how XB uses parts of the JSX theme engine and Redux:

Ben walks you through how XB leverages React and Redux to achieve the UX we need, while using existing Drupal field widgets. This will become even more important once we integrate the content entity form, with field widgets for base and bundle fields.

You have to watch the 20 seconds starting at 1:37 — pure genius: not the predictable AI-generated images to illustrate his talk, instead … his son’s drawings! :D

I hope to follow in his footsteps at a future DrupalCon, because I too am becoming a dad, very soon! :D I’ll be working at a very reduced rate during my paternity leave, but will be keeping these weekly blog posts going — it’s my way of keeping myself in the loop as well as all of you. That is also why I’ve shifted attention to meta things, to ensure the right expertise is present in areas that need to keep moving during my upcoming paternity leave :)

Week 20 was September 23–29, 2024.

1. We’re asking Dave to weigh in on a number of areas, to point his critical, independent core committer eye to key decisions early on. ↩︎

• Drupal
• Acquia
• Experience Builder

<strong>Topics covered in this episode:</strong><br> <ul> <li><strong><a href="https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3130/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Python 3.13.0 released Oct 7</a></strong></li> <li><strong><a href="https://peps.python.org/pep-0759/?featured_on=pythonbytes">PEP 759 – External Wheel Hosting</a></strong></li> <li><strong><a href="https://pypi.org/project/pytest-freethreaded/?featured_on=pythonbytes">pytest-freethreaded</a></strong></li> <li><strong><a href="https://github.com/MrMino/pytest-edit?featured_on=pythonbytes">pytest-edit</a></strong></li> <li><strong>Extras</strong></li> <li><strong>Joke</strong></li> </ul><a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w3-YkKMJ0E' style='font-weight: bold;'data-umami-event="Livestream-Past" data-umami-event-episode="404">Watch on YouTube</a><br> <p><strong>About the show</strong></p> <p>Sponsored by ScoutAPM: <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/scout"><strong>pythonbytes.fm/scout</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Connect with the hosts</strong></p> <ul> <li>Michael: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@mkennedy"><strong>@mkennedy@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> <li>Brian: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@brianokken"><strong>@brianokken@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> <li>Show: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@pythonbytes"><strong>@pythonbytes@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> </ul> <p>Join us on YouTube at <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/stream/live"><strong>pythonbytes.fm/live</strong></a> to be part of the audience. Usually <strong>Monday</strong> at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.</p> <p>Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/friends-of-the-show">our friends of the show list</a>, we'll never share it. </p> <p><strong>Brian #1:</strong> <a href="https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3130/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Python 3.13.0 released Oct 7</a></p> <ul> <li>That’s today!</li> <li><a href="https://docs.python.org/3.13/whatsnew/3.13.html?featured_on=pythonbytes">What’s New In Python 3.13</a> <ul> <li>Interpreter (REPL) improvements <ul> <li>exit works (really, this is worth the release right here)</li> <li>Multiline editing with history preservation. <ul> <li>history sticks around between sessions</li> </ul></li> <li>Direct support for REPL-specific commands like help, exit, and quit, without the need to call them as functions.</li> <li>Prompts and tracebacks with color enabled by default.</li> <li>Interactive help browsing using F1 with a separate command history.</li> <li>History browsing using F2 that skips output as well as the &gt;&gt;&gt; and … prompts.</li> <li>“Paste mode” with F3 that makes pasting larger blocks of code easier (press F3 again to return to the regular prompt).</li> <li>exit now works without parens</li> </ul></li> <li>Improved error messages <ul> <li>Colorful tracebacks</li> <li>Better messages for <ul> <li>naming a script/module the same name as a stdlib module.</li> <li>naming a script/module the same name as an installed third party module.</li> <li>misspelling a keyword argument</li> </ul></li> </ul></li> <li>Free threaded CPython <ul> <li>Included in official installers on <a href="https://docs.python.org/3.13/using/windows.html#install-freethreaded-windows">Windows</a> and <a href="https://docs.python.org/3.13/using/mac.html#install-freethreaded-macos">macOS</a> <ul> <li>Read these links to figure out how - it’s not turned on by default</li> </ul></li> </ul></li> <li>Lot’s more. see the What’s new page</li> </ul></li> </ul> <p><strong>Michael #2:</strong> <a href="https://peps.python.org/pep-0759/?featured_on=pythonbytes">PEP 759 – External Wheel Hosting</a></p> <ul> <li>pypi.org ships <a href="https://www.fastly.com/customers/python-software-foundation/?featured_on=pythonbytes">over 66 petabytes / month</a> backed by Fastly</li> <li>There are hard project size limits for publishers to PyPI</li> <li>We can host the essence of a <strong>.whl</strong> as a <strong>.rim</strong> file, then allow an external download URL</li> <li>Security: Several factors as described in this proposal should mitigate security concerns with externally hosted wheels, such as: <ul> <li>Wheel file checksums <strong>MUST</strong> be included in .rim files, and once uploaded cannot be changed. Since the checksum stored on PyPI is immutable and required, it is not possible to spoof an external wheel file, even if the owning organization lost control of their hosting domain.</li> <li>Externally hosted wheels <strong>MUST</strong> be served over HTTPS.</li> <li>In order to serve externally hosted wheels, organizations <strong>MUST</strong> be approved by the PyPI admins.</li> </ul></li> </ul> <p><strong>Brian #3:</strong> <a href="https://pypi.org/project/pytest-freethreaded/?featured_on=pythonbytes">pytest-freethreaded</a></p> <ul> <li>PyCon JP 2024 Team: <ul> <li>This extension was created at PyCon JP sprints with <a href="https://github.com/tonybaloney/pytest-freethreaded/blob/main/README.md#credits">Anthony Shaw and 7 other folks listed in credits.</a></li> </ul></li> <li>“A pytest plugin for helping verify that your tests and libraries are thread-safe with the Python 3.13 experimental freethreaded mode.”</li> <li>Testing your project for compatibility with freethreaded Python. <ul> <li>Testing in single thread doesn’t test that.</li> <li>Neither does testing with pytest-xdist, because it uses multiprocessing to parallelize tests.</li> <li>So, Ant and others “made this plugin to help you run your tests in a thread-pool with the GIL disabled, to help you identify if your tests are thread-safe.”</li> <li>“And the first library we tested it on (which was marked as compatible) caused a segmentation fault in CPython! So you should give this a go if you're a package maintainer.”</li> </ul></li> </ul> <p><strong>Michael #4:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/MrMino/pytest-edit?featured_on=pythonbytes">pytest-edit</a></p> <ul> <li>A simple Pytest plugin for opening editor on the failed tests.</li> <li>Type <code>pytest --edit</code> to open the failing test code <img src="https://paper.dropboxstatic.com/static/img/ace/emoji/2728.png?version=8.0.0" alt="sparkles" /></li> <li>Be sure to set your favorite editor in the ENV variables</li> </ul> <p><strong>Extras</strong> </p> <p>Michael:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://training.talkpython.fm/courses/all?featured_on=pythonbytes">New way to explore</a> Talk Python courses via topics <ul> <li>This has been in our <a href="https://training.talkpython.fm/apps?featured_on=pythonbytes">mobile apps</a> since their rewrite but finally comes to <a href="https://training.talkpython.fm/courses/all?featured_on=pythonbytes">the web</a></li> </ul></li> <li><a href="https://mkennedy.codes/posts/lets-go-easy-on-pypi-ok/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Let's go easy on PyPI, OK? essay</a></li> <li>Hynek’s video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UuW8o4bHbw">uv IS the Future of Python Packaging </a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UuW8o4bHbw"><img src="https://paper.dropboxstatic.com/static/img/ace/emoji/1f40d.png?version=8.0.0" alt="snake" /></a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UuW8o4bHbw"><img src="https://paper.dropboxstatic.com/static/img/ace/emoji/1f4e6.png?version=8.0.0" alt="package" /></a></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/adamchainz/djade-pre-commit?featured_on=pythonbytes">djade-pre-commit</a></li> <li>Polyfill.io, BootCDN, Bootcss, Staticfile attack <a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/polyfillio-bootcdn-bootcss-staticfile-attack-traced-to-1-operator/?featured_on=pythonbytes">traced to 1 operator</a></li> <li><a href="https://purgecss.com/CLI.html?featured_on=pythonbytes">PurgeCSS CLI</a> </li> <li><a href="https://blog.python.org/2024/10/python-3127-released.html?featured_on=pythonbytes">Python 3.12.7 released</a></li> <li><a href="https://discuss.python.org/t/incremental-gc-and-pushing-back-the-3-13-0-release/65285/1?featured_on=pythonbytes">Incremental GC and pushing back the 3.13.0 release</a></li> <li><a href="https://fosstodon.org/@midnitte/113239548093653991">uv making the rounds</a></li> <li><a href="https://fosstodon.org/@mkennedy/113247714541010618">LLM fatigue</a>, is it real?</li> <li>Take the <a href="https://survey.alchemer.com/s3/8009809/l-python-developers-survey-2024/?utm_source=pythonbytespodcast">Python Developers Survey 2024</a></li> </ul> <p><strong>Joke:</strong> <a href="https://inzonedesign.com/blog/28-cleverly-funny-creative-404-error-pages/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Funny 404 pages</a></p> <ul> <li>We have <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/not-found-page-or-something">something at least interesting at pythonbytes.fm</a></li> </ul>

API Testing in Pure English 2024-10-07, by Dariusz Suchojad How to test APIs in pure English

Do you have 20 minutes to learn how to test APIs in pure English, without any programming needed?

Great, the API testing tutorial is here.

Right after you complete it, you'll be able to write API tests as the one below.

Next steps:

➤ Read about how to use Python to build and integrate enterprise APIs that your tests will cover
➤ Python API integration tutorial
➤ Python Integration platform as a Service (iPaaS)
➤ What is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? What is SOA?

More blog posts➤

This weekend "The KDE Alberts"[1] attended Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2024 in Sunnyvale, California.

The Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit is an annual unconference that every project participating in Google Summer of Code 2024 is invited to attend. This year it was the 20th year celebration of the program!

I was too late to take a picture of the full cake!

We attended many sessions ranging from how to try to avoid falling into the "xz problem" to collecting donations or shaping the governance of open source projects.

 

We met lots of people that knew what KDE was and were happy to congratulate us on the job done and also a few that did not know KDE and were happy to learn about what we do.

 

We also did a quick lightning talk about the GSOC projects KDE mentored this year and led two sessions: one centered around the problems some open source application developers are having publishing to the Google Play Store and another session about Desktop Linux together with our Gnome friends.

 

All in all a very productive unconference. We encourage KDE mentors to take the opportunity to attend the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit next year, it's a great experience! 

 

[1] me and Albert Vaca, people were moderately amused that both of us had the same name, contribute to the same community and are from the same city.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 279. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ] * Drop removal of calculated basename from readelf output. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#394)

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Dear Debian community,

this are my bits from DPL for September.

New lintian maintainer

I'm pleased to welcome Louis-Philippe Véronneau as a new Lintian maintainer. He humorously acknowledged his new role, stating, "Apparently I'm a Lintian maintainer now". I remain confident that we can, and should, continue modernizing our policy checker, and I see this as one important step toward that goal.

SPDX name / license tools

There was a discussion about deprecating the unique names for DEP-5 and migrating to fully compliant SPDX names.

Simon McVittie wrote: "Perhaps our Debian-specific names are better, but the relevant question is whether they are sufficiently better to outweigh the benefit of sharing effort and specifications with the rest of the world (and I don't think they are)." Also Charles Plessy sees the value of deprecating the Debian ones and align on SPDX.

The thread on debian-devel list contains several practical hints for writing debian/copyright files.

proposal: Hybrid network stack for Trixie

There was a very long discussion on debian-devel list about the network stack on Trixie that started in July and was continued in end of August / beginning of September. The discussion was also covered on LWN. It continued in a "proposal: Hybrid network stack for Trixie" by Lukas Märdian.

Contacting teams

I continued reaching out to teams in September. One common pattern I've noticed is that most teams lack a clear strategy for attracting new contributors. Here's an example snippet from one of my outreach emails, which is representative of the typical approach:

Q: Do you have some strategy to gather new contributors for your team? A: No. Q: Can I do anything for you? A: Everything that can help to have more than 3 guys :-D

Well, only the first answer, "No," is typical. To help the JavaScript team, I'd like to invite anyone with JavaScript experience to join the team's mailing list and offer to learn and contribute. While I've only built a JavaScript package once, I know this team has developed excellent tools that are widely adopted by others. It's an active and efficient team, making it a great starting point for those looking to get involved in Debian. You might also want to check out the "Little tutorial for JS-Team beginners".

Given the lack of a strategy to actively recruit new contributors--a common theme in the responses I've received--I recommend reviewing my talk from DebConf23 about teams. The Debian Med team would have struggled significantly in my absence (I've paused almost all work with the team since becoming DPL) if I hadn't consistently focused on bringing in new members. I'm genuinely proud of how the team has managed to keep up with the workload (thank you, Debian Med team!). Of course, onboarding newcomers takes time, and there's no guarantee of long-term success, but if you don't make the effort, you'll never find out.

OS underpaid

The Register, in its article titled "Open Source Maintainers Underpaid, Swamped by Security, Going Gray", summarizes the 2024 State of the Open Source Maintainer Report. I find this to be an interesting read, both in general and in connection with the challenges mentioned in the previous paragraph about finding new team members.

Kind regards Andreas.

Last time I exposed an old way learned in physical labs to do C or python/tk like in the old days: by summoning a tcl/tk interpreter and piping commands to it.

But what fun is it?

It's funnier if the tcl/tk interperpreter talks back to python :D as an hommage to the 25 years awaited TK9 versions that solves a lot of unicode trouble.

Beforehand, to make sense to the code a little warning is required : this code targets only POSIX environment and loses portability because I chose to use a way that is not the « one best way » for enabling bidirectionnal talks. By using os.set_blocking(p.stdout.fileno(), False) we can have portable non blocking IO, which means this trick has been tested on linux, freeBSD and windows successfully.

First and foremost, the Popen now use p.stdout=PIPE enabling the channel on which tcl will talk. As a joke puts/gets are named from tcl/tk functions and are used in python to push/get strings from tcl.

Instead of using multithreading having one thread listen to the output and putting the events in a local queue that the main thread will consume I chose the funniest technique of setting tcl/tk output non blocking which does not work on windows. This is the fnctl part of the code.

Then, I chose not to parse the output of tcl/tk but exec it, making tcl/tk actually push python commands back to python. That's the exec part of the code.

For this I needed an excuse : so I added buttons to change minutes/hours back and forth.

That's the moment we all are gonna agree that tcl/tk that tcl/tk biggest sin is its default look. Don't worry, next part is about using themes.

Compared to the first post, changes are minimal :D This is how it should look : And here is the code, largely still below 100 sloc (by 3 lines). #!/usr/bin/env python from subprocess import Popen, PIPE from time import sleep, time, localtime # import fcntl import os # let's talk to tk/tcl directly through p.stdin p = Popen(['wish'], stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE) # best non portable answer on stackoverflow #fd = p.stdout.fileno() #flag = fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_GETFL) #fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_SETFL, flag | os.O_NONBLOCK) # ^-- this 3 lines can be replaced with this one liner --v # portable non blocking IO os.set_blocking(p.stdout.fileno(), False) def puts(s): for l in s.split("\n"): p.stdin.write((l + "\n").encode()) p.stdin.flush() def gets(): ret=p.stdout.read() p.stdout.flush() return ret WIDTH=HEIGHT=400 puts(f""" canvas .c -width {WIDTH} -height {HEIGHT} -bg white pack .c . configure -background white ttk::button .ba -command {{ puts ch-=1 }} -text << pack .ba -side left -anchor w ttk::button .bb -command {{ puts cm-=1 }} -text < pack .bb -side left -anchor w ttk::button .bc -command {{ puts ch+=1 }} -text >> pack .bc -side right -anchor e ttk::button .bd -command {{ puts cm+=1 }} -text > pack .bd -side right -anchor e """) # Constant are CAPitalized in python by convention from cmath import pi as PI, e as E ORIG=complex(WIDTH/2, HEIGHT/2) # correcting python notations j => I I = complex("j") rad_per_sec = 2.0 * PI /60.0 rad_per_min = rad_per_sec / 60 rad_per_hour = rad_per_min / 12 origin_vector_hand = WIDTH/2 * I size_of_sec_hand = .9 size_of_min_hand = .8 size_of_hour_hand = .65 rot_sec = lambda sec : -E ** (I * sec * rad_per_sec ) rot_min = lambda min : -E ** (I * min * rad_per_min ) rot_hour = lambda hour : -E ** (I * hour * rad_per_hour ) to_real = lambda c1,c2 : "%f %f %f %f" % (c1.real,c1.imag,c2.real, c2.imag) for n in range(60): direction= origin_vector_hand * rot_sec(n) start=.9 if n%5 else .85 puts(f".c create line {to_real(ORIG+start*direction,ORIG+.95*direction)}") sleep(.01) diff_offset_in_sec = (time() % (24*3600)) - \ localtime()[3]*3600 -localtime()[4] * 60.0 \ - localtime()[5] ch=cm=0 while True: # eventually parsing tcl output back = gets() # trying is more concise than checking try: back = back.decode() exec(back) except Exception as e: pass t = time() s= t%60 m = m_in_sec = t%(60 * 60) + cm * 60 h = h_in_sec = (t- diff_offset_in_sec)%(24*60*60) + ch * 3600 + cm * 60 puts(".c delete second") puts(".c delete minute") puts(".c delete hour") c0=ORIG+ -.1 * origin_vector_hand * rot_sec(s) c1=ORIG+ size_of_sec_hand * origin_vector_hand * rot_sec(s) puts( f".c create line {to_real(c0,c1)} -tag second -fill blue -smooth true") c1=ORIG+size_of_min_hand * origin_vector_hand * rot_min(m) puts(f".c create line {to_real(ORIG, c1)} -tag minute -fill green -smooth true") c1=ORIG+size_of_hour_hand * origin_vector_hand * rot_hour(h) puts(f".c create line {to_real(ORIG,c1)} -tag hour -fill red -smooth true") puts("flush stdout") sleep(.1)
Some history about this code.

I have been mentored in a physical lab where we where doing the pipe, fork, dup2 dance to tcl/tk from C to give a nice output to our simulations so we could control our instuition was right and could extract pictures for the publications. This is a trick that is almost as new as my arteries.
My mentor used to say : we are not coders, we need stuff to work fast and neither get drowned in computer complexity or endless quest for « the one best way » nor being drowned in bugs, we aim for the Keep It Simple Stupid Ways.

Hence, this is a Keep It Simple Stupid approach that I revived for the sake of seeing if it was still robust after 35 years without using it.

Well, if it's robust and it's working: it ain't stupid even if it isn't the « one best idiomatic way ». :P

Marble gets an update, KDE Connect gets a speed boost, and Kate gets all fluttery

Welcome to a new issue of “This Week in KDE Apps”! In case you missed it, we announced this series a few weeks ago, and our goal is to cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps and supplement Nate's This Week in Plasma published yesterday.

This week we had new releases of Tellico and Krita. We are also covering news regarding KDE Connect, the link between all your devices; Kate, the KDE advanced text editor; Itinerary, the travel assistant that helps you plan all your trips; Marble, KDE's map application; and more.

Let's get started!

Dolphin Manage your files

Dolphin now uses ripgrep-all or ripgrep for content search when Baloo indexing is disabled. Detailed information (Jin Liu, 24.12.0. Link)

The checksum and permissions tab in the property dialog used by Dolphin and other KIO-enabled applications is now more consitent with the other tabs. (Thomas Duckworth, Frameworks 6.8. Link)

Kaidan User-friendly and modern chat app for every device

Kaidan, KDE's XMPP instant messaging app, improves support for group chats. (Melvin Keskin, Link)

Kate Advanced Text Editor

Kate adds out of the box support for debugging Flutter projects. (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0. Link 1, link 2)

The option to 'Reopen latest closed documents' has been added to the tab context menu. (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0. Link)

Kdenlive Video editor

KDE e.V. and Kdenlive have posted two job offers for contractors to work on Kdenlive. Will this be your opportunity to contribute to KDE and get paid too?

KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices

KDE Connect starts up much faster on macOS — startup time has gone from 3s to 100ms! (Albert Vaca Cintora, 24.12.0. Link)

Kleopatra Certificate Manager and Unified Crypto GUI

Kleopatra makes its decryption errors easier to understand when content was encrypted with a certificate you don't have. (Tobias Fella, 24.12.0. Link)

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Krita 5.2.6 is out and fixes a critical issue that popped up in last week's release. More information.

Krusader File Manager

Krusader has been migrated to Qt6 and KF6. (Alex Bikadorov, 3.0.0. Link)

KStars Desktop Planetarium

KStars 3.7.3 is out with exciting features for astrophotography buffs. You're going to want to update if you're using multiple cameras with per-camera targeting and scheduling, leader-and-follower jobs, and focus synchronization. Read more here!

Weather View real-time weather forecasts

KWeather removes the "Add current location" button, as it doesn't work anymore since the shutdown of Mozilla's location service. (Devin Lin, 24.08.2. Link)

The setup wizard has been overhauled. (Devin Lin, 24.08.2. Link)

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

A new bi-monthly blog post about Itinerary and the infrastructure behind it is out: August/September in KDE Itinerary

Itinerary now extracts membership ids in German-language Eurostar (Thalys) tickets (Luca Weiss, 24.08.2. Link)

It can extract seat reservation data from SBB QR codes (Volker Krause, 24.08.2. Link)

If you are arranging accommodations, Itinerary can handle German language variants of NH Hotels booking confirmations (Volker Krause, 24.08.2. Link)

LabPlot Interactive Data Visualization and Analysis

The Color Maps Browser now has multiple view modes. Including one that shows detailed information about the used colors in the color map and that also allows to copy those values. (Alexander Semke, Link)

Added a new visualization type: Run Chart, (Alexander Semke, Link)

NeoChat Chat with your friends on matrix

NeoChat has a fix for a frequent and random crash on Android caused by receiving a notification. (James Graham, 24.12.0. Link)

The hover actions for the messages are now more reliable. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link)

Marble Virtual Globe

Marble Behaim got a new logo, similar to the Marble Maps logo. (Mathis Brüchert, 24.12.0. Link)

Marble Maps routing functionality was ported to Qt6 and redesigned. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link)

Spectacle Screenshot Capture Utility

Spectacle fixed a crash when saving while the system's timezone is misconfigured (Noah Davis, 24.08.2. Link)

Tellico Collection Manager

Tellico, the KDE app that helps you manage all your collecions, is out with version 4.0.1. This version includes fixes for Qt6. More information.

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

Tokodon fetches public servers and displays them in a list for registration. The list is fetched from joinmastodon.org and more filtering options will be added later. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

Instead of wrapping all the tags for a post, they are now made scrollable. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

Apps on Windows

KDE Apps on windows now have better looking tooltips and menus without black corners. (Carl Schwan, Breeze 6.2.1. Link)

Third Party Applications

To get your application mentioned here. Please contact us on invent or in Matrix.

Kraft Quotes and invoices for small business

Kraft is a desktop app making it easy to create offers and invoices quickly and beautifully in small companies. Version 1.2.2 was just released and contains some small bug fixes. This is the last release before Kraft 2.0. More information.

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and KDE's Planet, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general help KDE continue bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here. Please let us know in invent or in Matrix.

You're about to launch your new app or API, or even just a big refactor of your current project. Will it stand up and deliver when you put it into production or when that big promotion goes live? Or will it wither and collapse? How would you know? Well you would test that of course. We have Anthony Shaw back on the podcast to dive into a wide range of tools and techniques for performance and loading testing of web apps.<br/> <br/> <strong>Episode sponsors</strong><br/> <br/> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/sentry'>Sentry Error Monitoring, Code TALKPYTHON</a><br> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/workos'>WorkOS</a><br> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/training'>Talk Python Courses</a><br/> <br/> <strong>Links from the show</strong><br/> <br/> <div><b>Anthony on Twitter</b>: <a href="https://twitter.com/anthonypjshaw?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >@anthonypjshaw</a><br/> <b>Anthony's PyCon Au Talk</b>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or3PbMGMz4o" target="_blank" >youtube.com</a><br/> <b>locust load testing tool</b>: <a href="https://locust.io?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >locust.io</a><br/> <b>playwright</b>: <a href="https://playwright.dev?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >playwright.dev</a><br/> <b>mimesis</b>: <a href="https://github.com/lk-geimfari/mimesis?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >github.com</a><br/> <b>mimesis providers</b>: <a href="https://mimesis.name/en/master/providers.html?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >mimesis.name</a><br/> <b>vscode pets</b>: <a href="https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tonybaloney.vscode-pets&featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >marketplace.visualstudio.com</a><br/> <b>vscode power-mode</b>: <a href="https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hoovercj.vscode-power-mode&featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >marketplace.visualstudio.com</a><br/> <b>opentelemetry</b>: <a href="https://opentelemetry.io?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >opentelemetry.io</a><br/> <b>uptime-kuma</b>: <a href="https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >github.com</a><br/> <b>Talk Python uptime / status</b>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/status" target="_blank" >talkpython.fm/status</a><br/> <b>when your serverless computing bill goes parabolic...</b>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCIfWhAheVw" target="_blank" >youtube.com</a><br/> <b>Watch this episode on YouTube</b>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6UVq8zVtxU" target="_blank" >youtube.com</a><br/> <b>Episode transcripts</b>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/479/designing-effective-load-tests-for-your-python-app" target="_blank" >talkpython.fm</a><br/> <br/> <b>--- Stay in touch with us ---</b><br/> <b>Subscribe to us on YouTube</b>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/youtube" target="_blank" >youtube.com</a><br/> <b>Follow Talk Python on Mastodon</b>: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/web/@talkpython" target="_blank" ><i class="fa-brands fa-mastodon"></i>talkpython</a><br/> <b>Follow Michael on Mastodon</b>: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/web/@mkennedy" target="_blank" ><i class="fa-brands fa-mastodon"></i>mkennedy</a><br/></div>

SVG cursor themes is a new feature in Plasma 6.2, which we are really excited about. In this blog post, I would like to provide more background behind what motivated us to add support for them, what they are, and how to build them.

(Classic) cursor theme format

A cursor theme is a collection of images defining the contents of various cursor shapes and additional metadata (for example, the human readable name of the theme, whether the cursor theme inherits/extends another cursor theme, etc). On disk, it looks as follows

The cursors/ directory contains a list of Xcursor files and symbolic links to represent cursor shape aliases, e.g. the arrow being an alias for default. The XCursor format has been in use for a very long time now and it has a pretty simple structure

The layout of an XCursor file

An XCursor file consists of a header that includes a magic number to determine whether particular file is actually an XCursor file, the size of the header in bytes, the file version, and the number of ToC entries. Every ToC entry provides the information about the corresponding chunk, for example the chunk type and where the chunk can be found in the file. Lastly, a chunk contains some useful data. A chunk may contain image data or text data, etc.

For example, here’s the image data that can be found in the “default” cursor shape file in the Adwaita cursor theme

As you can see, the Adwaita cursor theme provides the following sizes: 24, 32, 48, 64, and 96.

The index.theme files looks as follows

[Icon Theme] Inherits=breeze_cursors Name=Cool Cursor Comment=That is a cool cursor theme

Cursor themes can be found in $DATADIR/icons directories. For example, /usr/share/icons or ~/.local/share/icons.

X11 vs Wayland cursors

Xcursor cursors are used both on X11 and Wayland, but the way how the cursor size is interpreted is different on the two platforms. X11 assumes that the cursor size is specified in the device pixels, while Wayland assumes that it’s in the logical pixels. Logical pixels have the same visual size across various devices, while physical pixels are specific to particular device. For example, 24 logical pixels on an output with a scale factor of 2 corresponds to 48 physical pixels.

Cursor sizes in Xcursor files are specified in the device pixels.

Another very important detail is that the XCURSOR_SIZE environment variable is treated differently by X11 and Wayland native applications. For example, if XCURSOR_SIZE is set to 24 and the output scale is 2, an X11 application would load a cursor with the size 24, but a Wayland application would effectively load a cursor with the size 48 (24 * 2) because it would see that the output is scaled so the provided cursor needs to be scaled accordingly as well.

“XCURSOR_SIZE=24 dolphin -platform xcb” (left) vs “XCURSOR_SIZE=24 dolphin -platform wayland” (right). Note that “Apply scaling themselves” has been selected in the display settings in Plasma Wayland Limitations of Xcursor

The most painful thing about Xcursor is its lack of the proper HiDPI support. As it was said in the previous chapter, the cursor size in Xcursor files is specified in the device pixels. On X, it’s not a problem because all geometries are specified in the device pixels. It also means that if you change the scaling factor on X, you need to change the cursor size manually so the cursor is not too small. On Wayland, the cursor size is specified in the logical pixels so the compositor and the clients have to scale the cursor size in order to match the output scale. For example, if the configured cursor size is 24 and the window is on an output with a scale factor of 2, the application needs to load an Xcursor cursor with the size 48. If the cursor theme provides cursors with such a size, perfect! But what if it doesn’t? At the moment, every compositor and client applies its own policies. Some find the cursor with the closest size and use that, some find the cursor with the closest size and then scale it to match the requested size at the cost of adding some blurriness, and so on. It’s a mess. Because neither compositors nor clients can agree how to handle such a case, you could easily observe the cursor changing its size when moving between windows owned by different applications or when moving the cursor between the window and its decoration, e.g.

A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.

It’s worth noting though that this issue can be worked around by using the cursor-shape protocol because with it, the application can delegate the compositor the task of loading and displaying cursors. But the bottom line is that the Xcursor format is unsuitable for the HiDPI model that we have present on Wayland.

Another issue with the Xcursor format is that the image data is stored in an uncompressed format. It is okay if you need to provide cursors with small sizes, for example up to 72, but there are cases when you need to display a cursor at a very large size. For example, one such a case is the shake cursor accessibility feature in the Plasma Wayland session.

With the shake cursor feature enabled, the cursor will be inflated when it’s shaken. In order to operate, it needs to load the default cursor shape with a size around 250. If cursor themes provided images for such sizes, their package sizes would easily blow up beyond the 100MiB mark. That’s not good. And as a workaround, in Plasma 6.1, the shake cursor uses its own high resolution images of the Breeze cursor themes.

A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post. Shake cursor without any workarounds in 6.1 A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post. Shake cursor with workarounds in 6.1

The XCursor format was perfectly suitable for the use cases that existed back in the late 90s and early 2000s, but things have changed over the years and its current raster nature can’t keep up with the use cases that we have now (2024). We’ve got fractional scaling, we’ve got accent colors, we’ve got features that enlarge the cursor, and so on.

SVG cursor format

First of all, let’s build a list of requirements that the svg cursor format must satisfy:

• obviously, it must support the ability to define cursor contents using svg files so we can fix HiDPI issues, etc
• easy porting process for existing clients and compositors
• it should be easy to develop and analyze svg cursor themes. Xcursor is a binary file format, which requires a special tool to create Xcursor files, we would like to avoid that with svg cursors
• last and the most important requirement is that there must be some compatibility with the existing cursor theme format. We must not be required to write a new system settings module to handle the new cursor format, and the apps that don’t support svg cursors should easily fallback to the Xcursor format.

Here’s how a cursor theme providing svg cursors would look like

index.theme has the same format both for XCursor and SVG cursors. cursors/ directory contains the XCursor cursors, and cursors_scalable/ contains the SVG cursors.

In cursors_scalable/, every cursor shape must have its own directory, or if it’s an alias, then it must be a symlink. Every cursor shape directory must contain the cursor image and a metadata.json file providing the information about the cursor.

For a static cursor, the metadata.json file looks as follows

[    {        "filename": "default.svg",        "hotspot_x": 4,        "hotspot_y": 4,        "nominal_size": 24    } ]

The filename property specifies the filename of the svg file. The hotspot_x and the hotspot_y properties specify the coordinates of the hot spot. The hot spot in the cursor determines the point where interaction with other elements on the screen occurs, e.g. clicks. The nominal_size property specifies the cursor size that the svg file represents. The nominal size is used to decide how much the svg image and the hotspot coordinates need to be scaled in order to get a cursor with the requested size. Note that the nominal size can’t be determined based on the <svg>‘s width and height attributes because there exist themes such as Breeze whose canvas is bigger than the represented cursor size. As an example, in the Breeze cursor theme, the canvas size is 32x32 even though the represented cursor size is 24 in order to accommodate for additional elements that can be attached to the arrow cursor, e.g. a little circle with a plus sign or a question mark.

For an animated cursor, the metadata.json file looks as follows

[ { "filename": "wait-01.svg", "delay": 30, "hotspot_x": 16, "hotspot_y": 15, "nominal_size": 24 }, { "filename": "wait-02.svg", "delay": 30, "hotspot_x": 16, "hotspot_y": 15, "nominal_size": 24 }, ... { "filename": "wait-42.svg", "delay": 30, "hotspot_x": 16, "hotspot_y": 15, "nominal_size": 24 } ]

The only new thing is the delay property. The delay property indicates the animation delay to the next frame.

A cursor theme that ships SVG cursors is required to have XCursor cursors too. This is needed to provide fallback for legacy applications that are unaware of the cursor-shape-v1 protocol or simply too old applications that are unlikely to be changed anymore. This restriction might be lifted in the future.

It is worth mentioning that SVG supports animations natively. However, that approach was not chosen for cursor animations for two reasons: to allow caching svg render results more easily and require fewer changes in the compositors and the apps to adapt the svg cursor format.

You can find the json schema for metadata.json over here.

Accent colors

Since the cursor contents is specified using the SVG format, it should be possible to re-color the cursor based on the currently configured accent color. As of now, it is not implemented, but, in general, this is doable and perhaps such a feature will be added to Plasma some day.

Standardization

This cursor format is not officially standardized. We are looking forward to making it upstream, but for now, the main focus is on confirming that the new format lives up to our and cursor creator needs.

To cursor theme creators

Breeze and Breeze Light are the only two cursor themes that support SVG cursors at the moment, but we would love to see custom themes adapting them too so users experience fewer issues with fractional scaling or other features in Plasma when using their favorite 3rdparty cursor themes. We would also like to hear feedback from the cursor theme creators regarding whether it’s easy to adapt this cursor format or whether some additional features are needed. You can reach out to us at Matrix in the #kwin room https://webchat.kde.org/#/room/#kwin:kde.org or in the kwin mailing list.

Examples

If you need an example of a cursor theme that supports SVG cursors, please check the Breeze cursor theme.

Closing words

The new SVG cursor format is amazing. Please try it!

🐍🏃The week before last was the annual Python Core Dev Sprint, graciously hosted by Meta in Bellevue, WA!

The idea: bring a bunch of Python core team members, triagers, and special guests to the same room for a week. It's hugely beneficial and productive, we held many in-depth discussions that just don't happen when we're all remote and async, and got to work on many different things together.

The sprint room

During the week, I reviewed 39 PRs, created 15, merged 10, updated 4, and closed 2 issues.

Monday highlights

As release manager for Python 3.14, I discussed with Brett Cannon one of his project ideas which will come after lock files, and after the next big one.

Also as RM, discussed with Russell Keith-Magee, Ned Deily, Łukasz Langa and Thomas Wouters about including official binaries for iOS and Android, which wandered into ideas about security releases.

I did some maintenance of our PyPI projects, adding PEP 740 attestations, support for the new Python 3.13 and dropping support for the very-nearly-EOL 3.8.

Tuesday highlights

Started investigating slow doctest on 3.13+ with Alex Waygood, who on Wednesday narrowed it down to a problem with the new incremental garbage collector, which would go on to be reverted by Friday and result in Python 3.13's Monday release to be postponed and replaced with an extra release candidate. Not ideal, but much better to discover these things before the big release.

We had a Q&A session with the Steering Council: Barry Warsaw, Emily Morehouse, Gregory P. Smith, Pablo Galindo Salgado and Thomas.

The Python Steering Council

Proofread Guido van Rossum's STAR voting proposal for electing future steering councils.

Discussed with Eric Snow his novel method for displaying many code samples in a table, using <details> disclosures to prevent the table being too wide. Looks like a good solution!

Wednesday highlights

I applied the finishing touches to PEP 2026 (Calendar versioning for Python) and Barry gave it a final review. Ready for submission!

Seth Larson, the PSF Security Developer-in-Residence, wasn't at the sprint but we discussed our plan to stop providing GPG signatures for CPython and rely on SigStore instead. Expect a PEP soon!

Also not at the sprint, I recommended PSF Infrastructure Engineer Jacob Coffee as a CPython triager. Welcome aboard!

The whole room discussed including static type annotations in CPython.

We had a Q&A session with two of the three Developers-in-Residence, Łukasz and Petr Viktorin.

Q&A with Łukasz and Petr

Discussed expanding the voter pool for Steering Council elections with Mariatta, Greg and Thomas.

Larry Hastings handed out, in return for oohs and aahs, some nice P.C.D.S. 2024 stickers he generously designed and printed up for us. Thanks!

PCDS 2024 stickers by Larry Thursday highlights

On the 26th September, at 10:26 Bellevue time (20:26 Helsinki time), I submitted PEP 2026 to the Steering Council!🤞

Brett discussed whether we should update PEP 387 to prefer 5 year deprecations instead of 2 years.

Brandt Bucher gave us all an update on the progress of the Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler ("we went from 0% slower to 0% faster!") and we discussed plans for Python 3.14.

Because I couldn't attend Thursday's Helsinki Python meetup due to being at another kind of Python meetup on the other side of the world, I gave the famous HelPy quiz to the assembled core devs. Unsurprisingly they did pretty well, but the most incorrect answer was a pleasant surprise: we've had ~400 not ~80 new contributors to Python 3.13!

Pablo performed card tricks!

Magic from Pablo

Meta took us out for a delicious dinner at a local fish restaurant. Thank you!

Friday highlights

Mariatta presented ideas to Jelle Zijlstra, Petr, Russell and me about to use modern tools to create a modern, interactive tutorial.

Also during the week, continued work with Adam Turner on improving the docs.python.org build. Adam wasn't at the sprint, so tag-teamed PR reviews overnight. After much work straddling many teams, projects and repos, we've got the full HTML build loop for 13 languages × 3 versions down from over 40 hours to just under 9 hours, with more improvements coming.

Made a demo of the CPython docs using the PyData Sphinx Theme.

Along with around 25 others, I was on Łukasz and Pablo's core.py podcast.

Łukasz and Pablo in their ad-hoc podcast studio in a Meta meeting room

Itamar gave us cake for the podcast's first birthday!

cake.py. Photo by Itamar Oren. Thank you

It was a hugely productive week, big thanks to Itamar Oren and Meta for organising and hosting!

See also Mariatta's excellent blog posts, and I recommend the core.py podcast with short interviews with some 25 attendees! Łukasz and Pablo were also guests on the Changelog podcast during the sprint.

Header photo by Itamar Oren

Well, the PySimpleGUI rug pulling of its licence reminded me how much dependencies are not a good thing.

Even though FreeSimpleGUI is a good approach to simpler tk/tcl binding in python : we can do better, especially if your linux distro split the python package and you don't have access to tkinter. I am watching you debian, splitting ALL packages and breaking them including ... tcl from tk (what a crime).

Under debian this stunt requires you to install tk : apt install tk8.6

How hard is it when tcl/tk is installed to do GUI programming in tk without tkinter?

Well, it's fairly easy, first and foremost coders are coders, they code in whatever language. If you do code in one language you can't do docker, simple sysadmin tasks (shell), compile C extensions (make syntax) or web applications (HTML + javascript). Hence, learning more than one language is part of doing python applications.

How hard is coding in tcl/tk natively?

Fairly easy: its difficulty is a little above lua, and way below perl thanks to the absence of references.

What value tcl have ?

It's still used in domain specific field such as VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration of electronic component).

So here is the plan : we are gonna do an application that do the math in python which is perfect for expressing complex math in more readable way than tcl and push all the GUI to the tk interpreter (albeit wish).

We are gonna make a simple wall clock ... and all tcl commands are injected to tcl through the puts function.
#!/usr/bin/env python from subprocess import Popen, PIPE from time import sleep, time, localtime # let's talk to tk/tcl directly through p.stdin p = Popen(['wish'], stdin=PIPE) def puts(s): for l in s.split("\n"): p.stdin.write((l + "\n").encode()) p.stdin.flush() WIDTH=HEIGHT=400 puts(f""" canvas .c -width {WIDTH} -height {HEIGHT} -bg white pack .c . configure -background "white" """) # Constant are CAPitalized in python by convention from cmath import pi as PI, e as E ORIG=complex(WIDTH/2, HEIGHT/2) # correcting python notations j => I I = complex("j") rad_per_sec = 2.0 * PI /60.0 rad_per_min = rad_per_sec / 60 rad_per_hour = rad_per_min / 12 origin_vector_hand = WIDTH/2 * I size_of_sec_hand = .9 size_of_min_hand = .8 size_of_hour_hand = .65 rot_sec = lambda sec : -E ** (I * sec * rad_per_sec ) rot_min = lambda min : -E ** (I * min * rad_per_min ) rot_hour = lambda hour : -E ** (I * hour * rad_per_hour ) to_real = lambda c1,c2 : "%f %f %f %f" % (c1.real,c1.imag,c2.real, c2.imag) for n in range(60): direction= origin_vector_hand * rot_sec(n) start=.9 if n%5 else .85 puts(f".c create line {to_real(ORIG+start*direction,ORIG+.95*direction)}") sleep(.1) diff_offset_in_sec = (time() % (24*3600)) - \ localtime()[3]*3600 -localtime()[4] * 60.0 \ - localtime()[5] while True: t = time() s= t%60 m = m_in_sec = t%(60 * 60) h = h_in_sec = (t- diff_offset_in_sec)%(24*60*60) puts(".c delete second") puts(".c delete minute") puts(".c delete hour") c0=ORIG+ -.1 * origin_vector_hand * rot_sec(s) c1=ORIG+ size_of_sec_hand * origin_vector_hand * rot_sec(s) puts( f".c create line {to_real(c0,c1)} -tag second -fill blue -smooth true") c1=ORIG+size_of_min_hand * origin_vector_hand * rot_min(m) puts(f".c create line {to_real(ORIG, c1)} -tag minute -fill green -smooth true") c1=ORIG+size_of_hour_hand * origin_vector_hand * rot_hour(h) puts(f".c create line {to_real(ORIG,c1)} -tag hour -fill red -smooth true") sleep(.1) Next time as a bonus, I'm gonna do something tkinter cannot do: bidirectional communications (REP/REQ pattern).

Authored by: Nadiia Nykolaichuk and Leonid Bogdanovych.

Zoom is a key player in the sphere of online meetings. They have the power to dissolve geographical barriers, uniting individuals and teams across vast distances for communication and collaboration. What can be more convenient than using a robust video conferencing platform? Using it in the comfort of your own Drupal website!

Python Core Sprint 2024: Day 5 Datetime and Hypothesis

I reviewed some issues that came to the CPython repo. There were a few interesting tickets related to the datetime module. These issues were discovered by Hypothesis, a property-based testing tool for Python. I’ve been hearing a lot about Hypothesis, but never really used it in production or at work. I watched a talk about it at PyCon US many years ago, and I even had ice cream selfie with Zac who maintains Hypothesis. Anyway, I’ve just been interested in learning more about Hypothesis and how it could solve issues not caught by other testing methods, and I think this is one of the perks of contributing to open source: getting exposed to things you don’t normally use at work, and I think it’s a great way to learn new things.

I liked pySimpleGUI, because as a coder that likes tkinter (the Tk/Tcl bindings) and as a former tcl/tk coder I enoyed the syntaxic sugar that was avoiding all the boiler plates required to build the application.

The main advantage was about not having to remember in wich order to make the pack and having to do the mainloop call. It was not a revolution, just a simple, elegant evolution, hence I was still feeling in control.

However, the projet made a jerk move by relicensing in full proprietary license that requires a key to work functionnaly.

I will not discuss this since the point have been made clearly on python mailing list.

Luckily I want to raise 2 points :

• we have been numerous coders to fork the project for doing pull requests
• it higlights once more the danger of too much dependencies

If you have a working copy of the repository

Well, you can still install a past version of pysimpleGUI, but unless you can do pip install git+https://github.com/jul/PySimpleGUI#egg=pysimpleGUI

Pro: if that version suited you, your old code will work
Con: there will be no update for the bugs and it is pretty much a no-go.

Expect free alternative

One of the power of free software is the power to fork, and some coders already forked in a « free forever » version of pysimpleGUI.
One of this fork is : Free Simple GUI.

Pro: migration is as simple as : pip install FreeSimpleGUI and then in the source : - import PySimpleGUI as sg + import FreeSimpleGUI as sg
Con: a project is as useful as the capacity of the community to keep up with the job of solving issues and the strength of the community to follow up.

Migrating to tkinter

This will be covered in the week to come by translating some examples to real life migration by myself.

Since tkinter has improved a lot and his a pillar of python distribution when it is not broken by debian, it is fairly easy.

Pro: diminises the need for a dependency and empower you with the poweful concept of tk such as variables binded to a widget (an observer pattern).
Con: PySimpleGUI is a multi-target adaptor to not only tkinter but also remi (web), wx, Qt. If you were using the versatility of pysimpleGUI and its multi-platform features you really need to look at the « free forever » alternatives.

Plasma 6.2 will be released in just three days! In the end we did revert the notification changes I mentioned last week, so users of Plasma 6.2 won’t experience any new issues with notifications. The list of verified 6.2 regressions is extremely small, with most being low importance. We will of course eventually get them fixed anyway! But they aren’t release blockers.

Notable New Features

Distros can now customize the set of apps shown on Discover’s homepage in the “Editor’s Choice” section (Jarred Wilson, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

We’ve returned to the older style of default audio device naming from Plasma 6.1, plus a few extra heuristics to hopefully make it even better when using PipeWire. And don’t worry, the new feature to rename devices remains present (Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Discover now only shows the total size of available updates once it’s finished checking for them, so the number is always accurate and doesn’t bounce around (Soumyadeep Ghosh, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed the most common Plasma crash on X11, which was often encountered when waking up a sleeping monitor (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a common case where KWin could crash when using Overview to search for stuff (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed two a somewhat common seemingly random Plasma crashes (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed an issue that could, under certain circumstances, cause KWin to freeze when connecting or disconnecting an external monitor to a laptop (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause System Monitor sensors configured with certain combinations of faces and sensors to become permanently invisible! (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Improved the robustness of Plasma’s startup code, so that it doesn’t fail to launch when the kactivitymanagerd daemon is slow (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause animations to get stuck on certain screens with the Adaptive Sync feature turned on (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Removed the animations from Plasma’s Pager widget because they were too subtle to notice most of the time, and triggered a Qt bug that wrecks laptop battery life with auto-hidden panels. The Qt bug is under investigation, but at least now you should hit it less often (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed one of the bugs that could cause icon positions on the desktop to get reset after monitors turned off and back on again. This may also fix a very common similar bug where positions get reset when the resolution changes; that’s still being verified. And of course there may be other bugs with positioning as well, but this was one of them and it’s fixed now! Others are under Investigation (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed KWin’s “Toggle Raise and Lower” functionality so that it does in fact lower the window again (Jarek Janik, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a regression that caused the title of any components using Kirigami.OverlaySheet to be vertically mis-positioned (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 6.7. Link)

Changing regional settings for your user is now more reliable in the case where your distro or its installer set the value of all of the LC_* properties at a systemwide level — as apparently happens on Ubuntu (Han Young, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Made sure that pointer acceleration in XWayland games with screen scaling is the same as in native Wayland apps (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bug (up from 1 last week). Current list of bugs
• 30 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 33 last week). Current list of bugs
• 137 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

How You Can Help

You know what? Have a rest. It’s not feasible to work all the time; breaks are important too. Everyone’s been working so hard on Plasma 6.2, and I think the results are going to be great. Make sure not to neglect your mental health! Rest when you need it. Were all humans with physical bodies.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover additional ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite! Or consider donating instead! That helps too.

Although I've never written about them, I've been interested in music synthesisers for ages. My colleagues know this. Whilst I've been off sick, they had a whip-round and bought me a voucher for Andertons, a UK-based music store, to cheer me up.

I'm absolutely floored by this generosity. And so, I'm now on a quest to buy a synthesizer! Although, not my first one.

Alesis Micron on my desk, taunting me

I bought my first synth, an Alesis Micron, from a colleague at $oldjob, 16 years ago. For various reasons, I've struggled to engage with it, and it's mostly been gathering dust on my desk in all that time. (I might write more about the Micron in a later blog post). "Bad Gear" sums it up better than I could:

So, I'm not truly buying my "first" synth, but for all intents and purposes I'm on a similar journey to if I was, and I thought it might be fun to write about it.

Goals

I want something which has as many of its parameters presented physically, as knobs or sliders etc., as possible. One reason I've failed to engage with the Micron (so far) is it's at the other end of this spectrum, with hundreds of tunable parameters but a small handful of knobs. To change parameters you have to go diving into menus presented on a really old-fashioned, small LCD display. If you know what you are looking for, you can probably find it; but if you just want to experiment and play around, it's off-putting.

Secondly, I want something I can use away from a computer, as much as possible. Computers are my day-job, largely dominate my existing hobbies, and are unavoidable even in some of the others (like 3d printing). Most of the computers I interact with run Linux. And for all its strengths, audio management is not one of them. If I'm going to carve out some of my extremely limited leisure time to explore this stuff, I don't to spend any of it (at least now) fighting Pulseaudio/ALSA/Pipewire/JACK/OSS/whatever, or any of the other foibles that might crop up1.

Thirdly, I'd like something which, in its soul, is an instrument. You can get some amazing little synth boxes with a huge number of features in them. Something with a limited number of features but which really feels well put together would suit me better.

So… next time, I'll write about the 2-3 top candidates on my list. Can you guess what they might be?

1. To give another example. The other day I sat down to try and use the Micron, which had its audio out wired into an external audio interface, in turn plugged into my laptop's Thunderbolt dock. For a while I couldn't figure out why I couldn't hear anything, until I realised the Thunderbolt dock was having "a moment" and not presenting its USB devices to the laptop. Hobby time window gone!↩