Keysafe and screenshots.debian.net
After reading about screenshots.debian.net I’ve now uploaded a screenshot for the only package I have in Debian, keysafe. It will be visible to the public as soon at it has been approved.
Posts tagged ‘keysafe’
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Keysafe in Debian
Since a few days Keysafe is in Debian!
It’s both my first Debian package and the first time I’m “upstream”. Now I can point to something that I’ve given back, so this is a big thing for me. Next Debian target to reach—becoming a Debian Developer 
Experiencing Arch Linux
I’ve just “finished” installing Arch Linux. (I don’t think I’ll ever be finished for real since Linux is such a dynamic place. However, I’ve installed enough of Arch Linux to be writing this using Epiphany, running on a slick GNOME desktop.)
So far Arch has proven to be a nice, well designed system with a lean feel to it. Being used to Debian (lately Ubuntu) and its extreme attention to detail, Arch does give a more rough impression. It’s a price I think is worth paying, and believe me, it’s not as bad as it sounds. I’ve spent about 2 hours getting the base system, postfix, X.org, and GNOME installed and configured properly. A few small details remain, but I would have to attend to those no matter what distro I choose (getting HAL to refrain from mounting one of the partitions on my USB stick isn’t something that comes pre-configured in any distro I know of :)).
The only thing left doing now is building proper Arch packages for muttng and keysafe.
GConf in Python
It just didn’t feel right to have KeySafe use a Windows-style INI file for its configuration so I started looking into using GConf instead.
There are good introductions to GConf here and here. Translating it all to Python is simple thanks to the brilliant people who gave us Gnome-Python.
I wrote this code for viewing the setting of the desktop background’s filename:
#! /usr/bin/python
import gtk
import gtk.glade
import gconf
class GConfViewer:
def __init__(self):
gui = gtk.glade.XML('Viewer/viewer.glade')
self.entry = gui.get_widget('entry')
client = gconf.client_get_default()
client.add_dir('/desktop/gnome/background',
gconf.CLIENT_PRELOAD_NONE)
client.notify_add('/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename',
self.new_background)
self.new_background(client)
gui.get_widget('window').show_all()
def new_background(self, client, *args, **kwargs):
filename = client.get_string(
'/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename')
self.entry.set_text(filename)
if __name__ == '__main__':
GConfViewer()
gtk.main()
I really like the client-server nature of it. A short explanation:
- Get the default GConf client.
- Add directories.
- Tell it to watch a specific key, specifying a callback method to be called when its value is changed.
- Define the callback method.
I also wrote code to change the value of a key:
#! /usr/bin/python
import gconf
def set_bool_key(key):
client = gconf.client_get_default()
client.set_bool(key, 1)
if __name__ == '__main__':
set_bool_key('/desktop/gnome/background/draw_background')
Quite self-explanatory, isn’t it?
The next step in development would be to create a schema for the keys. Both
introductions above contain pointers on how to write schemas, for more
pointers just take a look in /usr/share/gconf/schemas/. The only problem I
ran into was registering the schema. The following commandline does the trick:
GCONF_CONFIG_SOURCE=$(gconftool-2 --get-default-source) \
gconftool-2 --makefile-install-rule keysafe.schemas
Of course the kind Debian developers have done their best to shield packagers
from nitty-gritty details. CDBS didn’t just work, it seems to make assumptions
about the build system of the package (assuming it’s using auto-tools). Just
making sure that the schema ends up in usr/share/gconf/schema during package
binary-install, then call dh_gconf -ppackage in
binary-post-install/package did the trick.
