wxForty-Two

I've just released the new 2.8.7.1 build of wxPython. This release has had some bugs fixed, some minor patches applied, and also incorporates the Google Summer of Code 2007 version of XRCed, and adds the Editra source code editor. More details can be found in the changes list. wxPython source and binaries for Windows, Mac OS X and Fedora can be downloaded from the download page. Binaries for Debian and Ubuntu i386 and amd64 architectures are available in the wxWidgets APT repository, see this wiki page for details.

NOTE: On Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) the Python 2.5 binaries of wxPython expect to be used with the user-installed version of MacPython, not the Apple installed version. A fix for this issue is being worked on for the next release. In the meantime you can either install MacPython 2.5.1 and adjust your paths so that that Python is used, or you can stick with Apple's Python and the wxPython 2.8.4.0 that comes with Leopard.

Happy Hacking!

For most of the time that I was actively using CVS (about a decade or so) if I wasn't using the command line interface then I most likely was using the pcl-cvs module for Emacs. It has a very good integration with emacs, with a dired-like listing of the files in the workspace that need some sort of attention. (They're modified, need updated, or etc.) It also apparently had very little overhead as the response time was always about as snappy as you could get with CVS, and when you're dealing with a source code repository with over 11,000 files in it every little bit counts. I tried a few other CVS-front ends over the years, but none of them seemed to suit me and my work habits very well. They either assumed too much or were too restrictive, in other words they got in my way more than they helped me to do my job.

A couple years ago OSAF switched from CVS to Subversion, and although I had played around with it a bit before this was my first real effort at using it. I love the advancements that SVN gives over and above what CVS can do, but I was very disappointed to find that the Emacs module for SVN (psvn.el) basically sucks. Although it provides an interface similar to pcl-cvs, it is very slow, often taking much longer to do something than it would take doing it from the command line, and it can sometimes block normal Emacs usage for a few seconds at a time while it churns at 100% CPU. So I looked at some other Free alternatives and didn't find anything that I liked. They were all either as slow or slower than the Emacs module, or they had the same problems that the CVS GUIs I had looked at had. So I gave up and used subversion from the command-line most of the time.

Now that wxWidgets has also switched to Subversion I started looking around for other solutions again... To my surprise I found that PySVN's WorkBench tool was a good fit for me. It's very fast at doing SVN operations, and it doesn't get in the way of how I work. I think I had dismissed it before mainly because it seems to be primarily intended as a test case and proof of concept for the PySVN Python extension module. So I started using WorkBench more and more and liked it more and more, but I also started noticing things that I didn't like as much, and some things that I thought could be done better, mostly UI and usability types of things. This brings me to the point of this article: WorkBench is Open Source so I could tweak it to my heart's content. And since it is written in Python and uses wxPython for the UI it is very easy for me to do so. And so that's what I've been doing off and on for the past couple months, and I have to say that it has turned out very well. Yesterday I submitted a big patch to the PySVN project, and although there are a few more things I would like to do to it, I am very happy with what I have done so far. And all of this is due to the Open Source nature of the project. Open Source allows me to make the tool be what I need it to be, and so I did it because I can.

A few weeks ago I sent the following challenge to the PYxIDEs list, and I thought it might be a good idea to republish it here to give it a little more exposure. Read the rest of this entry »