Yapsy 1.9 release

A new version of Yapsy, my fat-free DIY plugin framework,  has just been released ! The project went (again) dormant for a bit more than one year during which a couple of bug reports and features requests eventually waked it up :)

 

More details on the new release are available on sourceforge and so are the downloadable files.

And the first big news is that there is a version compatible with Python3 at last !

Another big news is that this gave me the occasion to search a bit over the internet and realise that there are actually people talking about yapsy here and there.

You find traces of it already on the famous stackoverflow (yes as far as I can tell, and as of 2011/12 they are all mentions of ‘my’ yapsy, very moving indeed :) ), on this quick inventory of Python plugin systems and more anecdotally on pastebin

And for the specific projects that use this library, so far I’ve found:

And of course this adds up with the great people I already had the occasion to thank in my latest post about yapsy.

Let’s face it, this ridiculously small piece of code is h-y-p-e… (ok I may be overdoing it a little but if I don’t do it who will ?)

publication (noun): The act of publishing printed or other matter

A quick post to celebrate the online availability of my PhD thesis !

Whatever its (lame) scientific significance, this will remain the very first book I’ve ever written, and, what’s more one that took me 3 years of hard work to gather its content.

After waiting 3 more years for it to come out the “confidential” closet in which it had been put, this is afterall a nice occasion to rejoice.

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My code is awesome ! Or at least its users are…

I’ve just received a nice e-mail pointing at an even nicer blog post about one of my pet project: Yapsy and the author states it quite clearly: “Yapsy is awesome”!

Many thanks to Roberto Alsina for these kind words and for the very nice tutorial he wrote about yapsy.

To be honest, Yapsy is above all just an absurdly tiny piece of code, and , even with that, still has a long way to go before I dare qualify it as awesome, but one thing is sure the developpers who use it already are undoubtedly the awesome ones !

Yapsy is a project I started 3 years ago on my free time, and put on SourceForge “just in case” it could be helpful… It went dormant several times but was waken up by requests and suggestions sent by developpers like Peppy’s Rob McMullenMysteryMachine’s Roger Gammans and now Aranduka’s Roberto Alsina who all deserve a big thank you.

In its latest release (5 days ago) I corrected some bugs and tried to make the documentation as useful as possible. All in all, I wanted to highlight the ways in wich yapsy could be used to simplify the development of a plugin manager, but Roberto beat me to this. I’m especially proud of two of his comments:

  • “One of the great things about Yapsy is that it doesn’t specify too much.”
  • “it helps you write better code.”

The first one was clearly indented but also known to be hard to get right (and IMHO yapsy’s not quite there yet).

The second is way beyond yapsy’s initial scope, but it’s really sweet to read, especially from somebody who — as it seems — has already tasted Qt development1

More info about Yapsy at ohloh

  1. Qt is well known among GUI toolkits for helping you write better code so that compliments from Qt developpers are worth twice as much :) []

BackupMonitor: important bugfix

Icône de Backup Monitor

A nasty bug found its way in the latest release of BackupMonitor which caused the program to suddenly exit when something went wrong during the execution of one of the backup script.

The bug has been corrected  (a problem with threads and a method call that should have been asynchronous) and the “correct” behaviour is back: when something goes wrong an error log is displayed and the program “hiberantes” until the user wakes it up.

The updated version can be downloaded from the project’s page.

BackupMonitor: improvements

Icône de Backup Monitor

A new version of backup-monitor has been released including:

  • bugfix for when the locale is not defined, or when playing a little with the script’s command line options
  • refactoring of the GUI to give the user more feedback and to give more hints on where to click (GUI inspired by Ubuntu’s update-manager)
  • using OptionParser to ease the command line handling
  • change in licence: for the GUI changes I’ve look and taken ideas from many GPL project, so it’s just fair (if not plain compulsory) to release this new version under GPLv3.

Most of these modification were motivated by the first feedbacks I got from a friend, thanks to him then ;)

For more info and download, please go here.