[Pygui] Python 3 Plans

[Matt Anderson]

On Feb 10, 2010, at 11:50 AM, Andrew McNabb wrote:

> Are you still using Mac OS 9? :)  I didn't know that you could still
> have resource forks in OS X.  As far as file types go, I've never seen
> OS X use anything other than the file extension.  The only metadata I've
> seen in OS X is the .DS_Store, which has things like icon positioning,
> etc.--things which don't seem particularly important for a code project.
> With OS X, I'm quite surprised that metadata would be a problem.

Actually, since 10.4 HFS+ has supported arbitrary extended attributes (sometimes called 'named forks'), which have become increasingly used for attaching various data to files. TextMate, for example, saves information about editing state as extended attributes[1] (caret position, bookmarks, text folding). They're used by Apple for the "quarantine" subsystem, finder/spotlight comments, etc.  Snow Leopard does all sorts of other weird things with extended attributes too[2].  Also, third party software has started to make use of them for associating arbitrary text "tags" with files which are findable with spotlight[3]. 

I was just starting to use extended attributes more extensively (for tagging) when I began using Mercurial, and I found it extremely frustrating that they didn't get saved in the repository, and I couldn't find a work around to save them. There's probably a way to access them as an "apple double" file and check that into the repository, but my few hours of research didn't turn up how. Eventually, I just gave up on using them because it was too much bother (and continued using mercurial, which I love).  

So to me, lack of metadata support is a legitimate problem. My solution (for now) has been to ignore the problem, but I can definitely see where that might be undesirable or unacceptable to some.

In any event, I'll chime in and say I would LOVE to see progress on pygui accelerate, and a larger community of folks get involved. I personally don't care so much about the cross-platform aspect of pygui -- I've given myself over to the Mac for the most part (though occasionally I'll use some other unix in a server capacity). But I hate programming in Cocoa/PyObjC. I can hobble along, but I would much prefer to write my entire Mac-only programs in "pythonic" python (sans Cocoa API) and still have a native GUI. Though, having them be mostly cross-platform with no additional effort would be a definite plus.

If there was an source repository and a clear way of being a contributor for the project, chances are high I would get involved and contribute.


[1] http://manual.macromates.com/en/saving_files.html#extended_attributes_metadata
[2] http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/3#footprint
[3] http://code.google.com/p/openmeta/

--
 Matt Anderson



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pygui/attachments/20100210/f8f298ee/attachment.htm>