[Pythonmac-SIG] pyobjc status and future

[Ronald Oussoren]

Hi,

Early november I finally got a new release of PyObjC out (version 2.4), and unless an unexpected problem crops up there will be another release (2.5) next Sunday. Version 2.5 will re-add some functionality that accidently got dropped in the 2.4 release (in particular the support for BridgeSupport files), and improves testing (which led to a number of bugfixes).

I've also migrated the website to http://packages.python.org/pyobjc, the old URL (http://pyobjc.sf.net/) is now just a redirect to the new location. The website is once again generated from the PyObjC source tree, the old one hadn't been updated in a long while because the scripts generating that site didn't work anymore due to restructuring of the pyobjc repository and documentation files.   I'd like to replace the current sphinx theme by something less generic, and that should happen sometime next year.    The same is true for the examples: that code needs to be cleaned up and updated.

I'll try to get on a more regular release pattern next year, with some luck leading up to a 3.0 release during the summer. That release would then feature a cleaned up core bridge, removing some cruft that was needed to support Python release before 2.6 and that cleanup should improve the performance of all of PyObjC.   The major stumbling block w.r.t. getting to 3.0 is time: I know what I want to do and how to get there, but expect to need a couple of days to work on this; my regular development pattern of doing a couple of hours development during the evening or in the weekend will probably be too inefficient to make serious progres.

Before 3.0 is out there should be at least a 2.6 release, and possibly other point releases, with improved framework coverage (not all system frameworks are available through PyObjC at the moment), other minor feature updates and bugfixes.

One thing I'm not sure about is Xcode support, in particular support for designing GUI using the Interface Builder tool embedded in Xcode. I don't like Xcode as a Python editor (which is why the xcode templates are basicly dead at the moment), and haven't made my mind up on how to proceed here.   Two major options are to either generate an Xcode project when needed (just to enough to let Xcode know where to find resource files and source code), and to just ignore Xcode completely but design the UI in Xcode.  That last option should be a lot easier with autolayout (introduced in OSX 10.7), but might need a helper library to keep code readable (I've noticed with other toolkits that it is very easy to end up with long blocks of code that create UI elements and have no useful structure).

Happy holidays,

   Ronald