DidRocks' blog

0.4.1 is a bug fixing release and will be the one in lucid final.

It contains of course all the goodness of 0.4 version plus some bug fixes that early users encountered:

• remove ~/.selected_editor detection. Introduced confusion for users who doesn't understand why (nano, most of the time), was triggered instead of gedit (LP: #565586). It's still possible to override the choosen editor with EDITOR or SELECTED_EDITOR environment variables.
• fix gpg key creation with no email address. Fortunately, new Quickly user won't have to bother that much with gpg key anymore (see 0.4 blog post to see what's still needed to be done)
• fix again some tutorial issues which had been lost during html -> docbook transition
• better message and user help when ppa not found
• add more debugging info in --verbose mode for gpg keys
• updated translations

0.4.1 should be building soon on the ubuntu builders, keep it hot! Release tarballs are available as usual on Launchpad

Kudos to Lutin for the photo

I have been a highly screen + irssi user for some years running on my server and then, just sshing to it. Apart from the high latency on typing you can get when your connection begins to lag, everything fulfil my need.

However, last week, pitti told me that he was using a wonderful feature which is called "smart filtering". If you are a long time IRC user and particularly if you go to crowded channels, you know how seeing all this join/part messages can be annoying. Of course, most of IRC clients can hide all join/part/quit/away messages on selected channels.

But smart filtering brings the concept a little bit further: you can tell "show me /quit /join only if the user was speaking on the channel in the last xxx minutes". Great to not speak into the wild when you're not always looking at your channel user list every minute! Unfortunately, it seems there is no such extension for irssi. As writing a plugin in perl is not my taste, I moved to weechat where this feature has been implemented. It was the right time to try as well bip (an IRC proxy).

bip gaves me some hard time because intrepid^[1] version is buggy: it preprends backlogs with - (and xchat doesn't highlight the channel if a message begins with "-") and adds "+" to other messages. Well, updating it just fix it, but it took some time to figure out (xchat was hiding those - et +).

Once done, I tried weechat, which seems to be a very great IRC client in a modular architecture. No more latency in typing things as the client is now local and connecting to my bip proxy. The only annoying part is that I'm connected to 4 different IRC networks (and consequently, 4 bip networks) and buffers^[2] aren't properly ordered after restarting it. I have to run /layout apply 3 times to get the correct ordering at each start This is a known bug.

Then, I installed the notification script. The annoying bit for me was that I got spammed with too many notifications:

• you are notified everytime someone highlight you in a channel (seems logical for a notification script)
• you are notified at each private message someone sent you!

And there is where the nightmare begin: if you begin with a long private conversation to someone, you'll get spammed for endless time (especially when notification are shown for 10 secondes at each message!). To fix that, I've just hack quickly on notify.py script (yes, it's in python) to add a smart_notification option (off by default).

If you run: /set plugins.var.python.notify.smart_notification on then smart notification is activated. That means that you won't get notified if someone is either highlighting you in the current channel you have a buffer opened to, or in your current private conversation. That means, logically, you won't get notification if you're looking at the channel you are currently looking at. You'll only see the red/yellow/whatever color line weechat highlight your text. Of course, if your are highlighted not in your current buffer (someone is beginning a private conversation you didn't switch to), you'll still be notified. The idea is only to warn you if you have something that needs to get your attention you're not currently looking at right now, sweet isn't?

The new version (0.0.4) is sent upstream, if it won't get it before lucid, I'll upload it to Ubuntu to get it there.

You can find this new version there: notify.py

It's another milestone that the ubuntu-fr French team has achieved this week-end. We had in Paris 5 000 attendees^[1] at the Karmic Koala ubuntu party!

After the ubuntu release party (just a few people, mainly ubuntu-fr directly related, joining to have a great time on a dinner) we finished to prepare the Ubuntu Party as our last sprint on Karmic. Only few core organizers^[2] but more than 100 of volunteers all over the week-end were present to give an hand on helping people, being at the different booths and others miscellaneous tasks!

This party was particular in the sense that Mark Shuttleworth visited us on Saturday, following the Party the whole day. Mark's kindness was greatly appreciated inside the community and a lot of people have been able to discuss with him. He also had, of course, some interviews at the radio and by press... The first day was concluded by his plenary session where a lot of questions has been answered too. We hope to be able to broadcast the videos very soon.

The public seems to have enjoyed this event and that was our goal! You can see below before the plenary when Tristan Nitot asked to "raise both hands if you use Ubuntu!"

We also had a roundtable on Internet neutrality which had attracted a bunch of people. Internet neutrality is unquestionably one of next hot subject that FLOSS has to dealt with great care.

As usual, our party tries to cover a lot of different activities for a wide range of public: obviously, people are able to install Ubuntu with a volunteer, but we also had a bug jam, workshops (drupal and "how to make a conference"), multiple multimedia demonstrations (gimp, video, music, compiz, cairo-dock), video games...

Some non profit organizations related to FLOSS also had a booth to show the whole "Libre" ecosystem to the visitors and present the philosophy behind Ubuntu, and more generally, the free software movement. Namely, April, Framasoft, FDN and La Quadrature du Net joined the pary!

As at each Party, we also had our ubuntu-fr booth with a lot of goodies : our French localized ubuntu CD, stickers, Tee-Shirts, Framakey Ubuntu-fr remix (USB key), our updated mug, Simple Comme Ubuntu (ubuntu book)... I'll specifically talk about them in the following days.

Conferences was also a great place to get and covered interesting topics as on other GNU/Linux distributions (debian, mandriva, fedora...), how to contribute, design experience at Canonical, free software in France... In a nutshell, more than 20 conferences over the two days.

We also gave different lessons on discovering ubuntu, GNU/Linux shell learning level 1 and 2, customizing your desktop...

Of course, Oxyradio covered the whole event and made possible the link with people who can't attend it.

5000 attendees is just awesome for a voluntary only non profit organization. Thanks to everyone who made this possible in a 4 months preparation. It's time to get some rest until we have to start again for another round!

Photos licenses:

* Tristan Nitot / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
* Nicolas Barcet / CC BY 2.0
* Raps / CC BY-SA 2.0

4ème jour, la fatigue se fait sentir, je me permets donc d'être concis

Première session sur "Adding a namespace for panel/symbolic icons". L'idée est d'ajouter une sorte de standard pour les noms d'icône afin de préférer les icônes monochromes dans le panel pour être plus concis.

Le futur de l'écran d'accueil et son introduction avec Xsplash ont été abordés lors de la session Karmic GDM greeter and xsplash. Beaucoup de changements à attendre pour lucid+1. Concernant lucid, la sélection du premier compte utilisateur (qui n'aura alors plus qu'à entrer son mot de passe) dans le cas d'une machine qui n'a qu'un seul utilisateur.

La session suivante fut sur l'amélioration du démarrage du desktop. 4 secondes est le crédit sur la machine référence (un Dell mini 10). 4 secondes et très peu et le challenge est de taille. Vincent et Ryan ont pu donner leur point de vue upstream. Certains changements pourraient subvenir pour lancer quelques processus supplémentaires en parallèle. Cependant, à nouveau, le challenge est rude

La dernière session de la matinée a consisté à l'ajout de fonctionnalités dans le gdmsetup. Comme beaucoup de personnes ont remarqué, GDM a changé sur karmic et le nouveau GDM ne supporte pas autant d'options pour changement son comportement que le dernier (Canonical a ajouté pour l'instant uniquement des fonctionnalités de base comme le choix de l'utilisateur à connecter automatiquement). Il y aura un aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa^[1]. Donc je disais, il y aura un moyen de changer le thème gtk+, le fond d'écran…

Dell a ensuite présenté leur nouvelle offre et contraintes d'installation et de vente d'Ubuntu par défaut sur leurs ordinateurs depuis 3 ans. Beaucoup de virtualisation après par des plénières sur KVM et Eucalyptus par les développeurs upstreams. Ubuntu on the cloud!

Une nouvelle session sur hacking on Launchpad, pourrait être intéressant de jeter un œil dna sun proche futur.

La session sur Ubuntu Server tips a introduit l'idée d'utiliser des "astuces du jour", très courtes, pour ubuntu serveur à chaque connexion$$en utilisant bien entendu MOTD).

La dernière session de la journée a présenté un nouvel outil pour scanner^[2] mais en ayant une GUI simplifiée et utilisable par un être humain classique. Robert Ancell a écrit une première version qui devrait remplacer xsane par défaut dans Lucid.

Plus qu'une journée ! Le meilleur reste à venir

Petit à petit le jet lag devient de moins en moins présent même si Lucas s'est réveillé à 5h30^[1] et on a donc commencé à récupérer nos mails et faire quelques commits, dév, etc.^[2]

La première du matin auquelle je devais assister n'a… pas eu lieu. Mais ça a été un bon moment pour jouer un peu avec UNR… oupsss UNE (Ubuntu Netbook Remix deviendra Ubuntu Netbook Edition sur Lucid).

J'ai ensuite assisté à la session "Update syslinux" qui consistait principalement à retravailler l'expérience utilisateur dès la mise en place du Desktop CD (le premier menu qui affiche la langue, puis les différents choix proposés). Une autre session est proposée car le fait de ne plus afficher le menu de langue par défaut fait débat: est-ce que l'utilisateur pourra trouver l'option pour changer la langue, est-ce que cela devrait être géré graphiquement une fois X lancé? Bref, pas de réponse évidente n'a été trouvée au terme de la session à ces questions.

La session suivante était sur "Créer une session UNR/UNE pour le desktop". L'idée est de rendre possible pour tous l'installation de UNR et de la session GNOME par défaut (Ubuntu classique) en parallèle. Beaucoup de problèmes se posent, notamment la non configuration du nouveau GDM introduit dans Karmic, l'autologin d'UNR, les applications supplémentaires installés. Mais les tests commenceront dès la semaine prochaine^[3] pour avoir un paquet qui rend cela possible. Ensuite, il suffira de choisir sa session dans GDM pour bénéficier de l'expérience des différents DE (sachant que UNR est un peu particulier car s'appuyant sur GNOME).

La session suivante était sur "Social From The Start - Gwibber Integration". L'intégration par défaut de tous les éléments comme Facebook, et autres outils de socialisation est un point où la Design Team donne beaucoup d'effort. Des résultats sur les études de différents types d'utilisateur de ces services ont été exposés et quelques travaux préparatoires seront éventuellement visibles dans Lucid (Gwibber, possibilité de poster des images directement, intégration avec Empathy…)

Après le repas, j'ai pu aider une personne à faire une transition de son projet vers Quickly (j'ai reçu et fait beaucoup de travail/bug fixes depuis la présentation d'hier et Quickly devient un peu un buzzword ici :)). Les sessions en plénières couvraient Kubuntu Netbook Remix (qui sera intégré directement chez KDE comme une version supportée), une présentation des processeurs ARM par un intégrateur travaillant chez Dell, une présentation de la Launchpad API (abondamment utilisée par des applications comme bughugger ou Quickly) et finalement la présentation de TestDrive, qui synchronise pour vous la dernière version en cours de développement (lucid à l'instant), et lance une machine virtuelle avec ce système pour vous. Plus de raison pour ne pas tester. Il y a même une version graphique créée par Quickly!

L'après-midi a été ponctuée par une session sur les nouveaux développements et configuration du nouveau GDM qui seront fait par Canonical. gdmsetup qui propose aujourd'hui deux choix (la connexion automatique et l'utilisateur par défaut) sera éventuellement et éventuellement Quickly sera utilisé pour créer un template afin de rendre la création de nouveaux thème plus facile.

Une session sur la mise à jour de l'ancienne LTS (hardy) vers la future Lucid a mis en avant beaucoup d'idées intéressantes. Notamment beaucoup de tests automatisées sur la mise à jour seront fait. Comme déjà expliqué hier, il y aura quelques mises à jours plus agressives pour nettoyer la configuration de l'utilisateur, à sa demande.

Enfin, la dernière session sur les futurs améliorations de GTK et notamment le fait que la barre supérieure soit supportée par GTK et non le Window Manager. Cela soulève une fois de plus quelques problèmes comme le fait de pouvoir toujours fermer l'application quand celle-ci freeze. Il sera par contre possible de supprimer ou de changer le décorateur comme Chrome le permet et également de pouvoir appliquer des effets comme la transparence sur certains composants et nons sur toute l'application comme le fait compiz aujourd'hui.

C'est tout (et c'est déjà pas mal) pour une deuxième journée. Il est de sortir un peu sur Dallas et d'aller boire quelques bières

-> Goûter la Budweiser -> Fait -> Ok

-> Goûter la Root Bier -> Fait -> FAIL!

Après quelques 13 heures de voyages, me voici à Dallas afin de vous faire partager l'UDS Lucid!

Pour les personnes qui ne le savent pas, l'UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) est la réunion binannuelle des dévelopeurs ubuntu (Canonical et la communauté) ainsi que quelques personnes de projets amonts qui sont invités (debian, GNOME…).

J'ai la chance d'être sponsorisé pour la deuxième fois consécutive par Canonical pour assister et participer à ces réunions. Mais même si vous ne pouvez pas participer physiquement, il reste les chans IRC et le progamme disponible sur le wiki d'ubuntu.com. Et le programme des conférences/discussions: programme complet ici

En fait, il est tout juste lundi matin et le sommeil fût difficile à trouver avant cette première journée.

J'essayerais de m'astreindre à un compte-rendu journalier des activités et discussions auxquelles je participe afin de tenir un petit journal de ce qui pourrait arriver lors de la prochaine release d'ubuntu.

In our French ubuntu party organized by ubuntu-fr, we have approximately 20 free and ready to use computers for people to be able to try ubuntu on their own (we have someone around to help new users).

But that's a lot of wasted space for advertising our conferences, scheduled demonstrations, lessons we have during the party! So, the idea was to create a daemon notifying this, resulting in:

NotifyThis is here to fulfill this need. It's a desktop daemon (no pid file) using dbus for single instance and actions like pausing, stopping, forcing configuration file reload^[1]…

Source file is in XML (default in /etc/notifythis-data.xml):

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <notifythis xmlns='http://launchpad.net/notifythis' xml:lang='fr'>
   <notiftypes>
       <type>
           <name>lesson</name>
           <priority>low</priority>
           <icon>/usr/share/icons/Humanity/apps/22/gnome-terminal.svg</icon>
       </type>
       <type>
           <name>conference</name>
           <priority>low</priority>
           <icon>/usr/share/icons/Humanity/stock/22/stock_people.svg</icon>
       </type>
       <type>
           <name>demos</name>
           <priority>low</priority>
           <icon>/usr/share/icons/Humanity/places/22/user-desktop.svg</icon>
       </type>
       <type>
           <name>miscellaneous</name>
           <priority>low</priority>
           <icon>http://awesomeurl/dialog-warning.svg</icon>
       </type>
   </notiftypes>
   <notifevents>
       <event>
           <title>Beginners lesson</title>
           <content>Lesson for beginners in 10 min</content>
           <type>lesson</type>
           <time>2009-09-27 12:33</time>
       </event>
       <event>
           <title>Advanced lesson</title>
           <content>Advanced lesson starting in 15 min</content>
           <type>lesson</type>
           <icon>http://unexistingurl/stock_dialog-warning.svg</icon>
           <time>2009-09-26 22:01</time>
       </event>    
       <event>
           <title>Awesome conference</title>
           <content>An awesome conference on Ubuntu will start in 5 min.\nKeep it hot!</content>
           <type>conference</type>
           <time>2009-09-27 23:54</time>
       </event>
       <event>
           <title>End of the event</title>
           <content>Well… I guess you will have to leave NOW!</content>
           <type>miscellaneous</type>
           <icon>/usr/share/icons/Humanity/status/22/stock_dialog-warning.svg</icon>
           <time>2009-09-27 23:55</time>
       </event>
   </notifevents>
 </notifythis>

What can I do in this notifythis namespace?

You associate an event instance (in notifevents/event ) to a notifytypes/type/name declared in the file. Types enables you to set some default priorities and icons to events. <Icon> refers to a path to an icon, which can be local to your computer or distant served by your preferred web server (http://…). In the latter case, NT will cache it for you locally. Consequently, using multiple times the same icon in different types or events will download it only once.

Title is used as… notification title and content as… content <time> is used to specify when the event will be notified. Categorizing your event is just a way to avoid multiple icon/priority definitions, but those two values can be overridden for a particular event simply specifying corresponding tag (<icon> for instance). If it can't be found, event type icon will be shown. If this one doesn't exist/can't be reachable either, a warning is spawn in log file and no icon will be displayed.

So, you can for your event, but it can be bound with any kind of other things like calendar, TODO items, and so on…

But well, as unscheduled event changes may happen^[2], you surely want to upload your xml file online and reload it in all NotifyThis daemon dynamically. It's possible too (and what we will do during our party).

In /etc/notifythis, you can set where the xml file is:

 # time in minutes beteen two xml file reloading, default is 30 minutes
 DELTA_BETWEEN_XML_RELOAD=30
 
 # xml files (separated by ';') by order of preferences.
 # It can an absolute or a relative path to this file.
 # It can be a network path (http://) too
 XML_FILES=notifythis-data.xml

You can even specify multiple XML_FILES and first found one will be use (like in XML_FILES=http://my/central/xml/file.xml; /usr/local/mybackupfile1.xml;notifythis-data.xml). XML file will be reloaded every $DELTA_BETWEEN_XML_RELOAD min (30 min if not specified) in each daemon. If no xml file is found, previous working configuration is preserved and a retry is done every minutes then.

By default, NotifyThis is a desktop daemon^[3] launched with a classical .desktop file in /etc/xdg/autostart/. Log are in ~/.local/share/notifythis/notifythis.log

Well, NT uses Quickly to simplify project handling. I guess we should investigate in a desktop-daemon template, making properly the double forking, using dbus instead of a pid file and dbus communication to reload configuration file, stop, pause… this can be handy! We can perhaps add a way for a template to reference another template to avoid redefining same commands twice and gives an easy way to call them (without having specifying --template ubuntu-project, for instance).

Well, if you want to give it a try, NotifyThis 0.1 is out and is available in my ppa.

Hier, Christophe a posté sur le planet ubuntu anglophone quelques photos de Toulouse. Aujourd'hui, c'est au tour de Paris! Cet évènement est bien évidemment également organisé par ubuntu-fr.

Au programme:

• la testing jam sur la version béta de karmic très stable

• une bug jam, tout comme il y a 6 mois

• une documentation jam (afin de nettoyer et préparer les 7000 pages du wiki d'ubuntu-fr

D'autres photos et même un professeur inattendu

We are now almost ready to land! Here is the last part of this long suit of blog posts about Quickly.

Packaging your project

It's the last, but not the least issue when you are writing your software: once your application is functional, you surely want to enable other users to install it. Well, you can give it into a tar.gz and run from a trunk, but what about creating a nice package, containing all dependency information for you^[1]? Let's see how to achieve this automagically.

Build your project locally

First good idea (even if it's not compulsory) is to try to build it locally. Just issue this command for that:

$ quickly package

It will creates a debian binary package (deb) from your project. The first time, quickly package creates the packaging too. Before running the package command you can edit the Icon and Category entry of your <project_name>*.desktop.in file.

Note that if you didn't run quickly release, quickly share or quickly change-lp-project you may miss the name, email and some other entries in setup.py file. So, you won't have those metada in your package. You can edit them if you don't want to use any of these commands afterwards. Those changes are not mandatory at all for testing purpose.

Quickly package will retrieve all dependencies on your project for you and then build the package locally. You will get a .deb file in the upper folder of your project directory and can install it for testing purpose.

In addition to giving a lot of hints to setup.py, default ubuntu-project enables you to have some automation to specify a data directory that works both from trunk or specified location. If you know a little about python packaging, you can build and install your own local version with python setup.py build -homedir </usr/local/...> (or -rootdir) and this (and any other path) is taken into account at build time.

Debian package description is taken from setup.py where you can change them by editing

description='UI for managing …',
long_description='Here a longer description',

licensing

Stop! Before packaging and making it available to whole world, you really should license your project

Hum, I know what you think "licensing is boring, I never know what I must do and ship in my package" (how many upstreams never shipped the GPL vanilla file in their tarballs). That's an old story with Quickly. Just launch

$ quickly license

to create a GPL-3 project, shipping all desirable headers to all files as well as the right LICENSE and AUTHORS file.

It will warn you that you should modify "# Copyright (C) YYYY <Your Name> <Your E-mail>" in Copyright file if you "$ launch quickly license" the first time before launching "$ quickly share" or "$ quickly release" (in the other case, all files are licensed automatically with GPL-3 and name/email are taken from Launchpad). So, edit it manually in the former case.

But well, you are going to tell me that you don't want to license under GPL-V3? Shell-completion will reveal your all supported licenses by Quickly:

$ quickly license [Tab][Tab]
BSD     GPL-2   GPL-3   LGPL-2  LGPL-3

Quickly always ship the right files and put the header in an according form. Be aware^[2] that you can relicensed your project with another license once if you have already licensed it. It will just override your previous license and clean all files accordingly.

If you want to put your own Quickly unsupported License, put your own license text in Copyright file between the tags ### BEGIN AUTOMATIC LICENCE GENERATION and ### END AUTOMATIC LICENCE GENERATION. Then "$ quickly license" does the trick and will add your personal license to every files.

Adding new licenses is really easy, if you think that another license ought to be included in ubuntu-project, do not hesitate to open a bug against Quickly.

So, no more mess when licensing your project. It also updates setup.py and next "$ quickly package" (or "$ quickly release/share) will update the Debian packaging too.

sharing

I guess that your are now ready to enable the world to discover an early beta of your application without publishing this version (or intermediate release) as stable one?

Launchpad ppa are great for that and avoid releasing an official version. It's as easy as:

$ quickly share

It updates your PPA with the the latest saved project changes.

So, before running "$ quickly release", you should: create your account on http://launchpad.net and add a PPA to your launchpad account. Quickly will check that you have an ssh and gpg key. We hope to be able to add advanced support to that in later release.

The first time the command is issued (and that "$ quickly release" was not issued before), it will ask to open a webpage for identifying your Launchpad account so that you can bind Quickly with Launchpad. This is done once by machine (that is to say, all projects on a host share the same launchpad account).

Then name, email and version setup.py will be automatically changed. Version will be <current_release~publicX> where X is incremented at each "$ quickly share" execution before a new release is done.

If "$ Quickly package" was not issued before, it will run it. Same for licensing, updating name, email, license to every part of your project. No more unlicensed file.

Then, it pushes a source package to your ppa. Just wait for Soyuz (in Launchpad) builds your package and you can make your friend discover your project!

releasing

Well well well, when you have tested throughly your package, it's time to release it, isn't?

$ quickly release <release_number> notes about changes

<version> and <description of the release> are optional. Let's see first without them:

$ quickly release

This command first ask for a Launchpad account if you didn't run "$ quickly share" before in any other project. Then, it will propose you to bind your project with an existing Launchpad project, search it with some keywords and then enter the number corresponding to your project. That will be done once per project and finally, if you didn't packaged it previously (neither with quickly package, nor with quickly share), it will do it (same with license issue).

If you didn't put any release version, Quickly will then release it with current number in setup.py (0.1 when you create your project and then, incremented by +0.1 each time the command is issued). If you previously used "$ quickly shared" publicX will be dropped to release <current_release> version (as <current_release>~publicX is less than <current_release> in packaging world).

If you feel the current version is an "0.8" release (without respecting the +0.1 order), your can launch:

$ quickly release 0.8

to enforce this value.

Then, Quickly will save the current state (with the optional notes about changes commit message), add a tag to it and bind your bzr branch with the corresponding project in Launchpad (pull and push). Finally, it will create the source package and upload it to your ppa before bumping the revision (+0.1), ready for next changes.

Of course, some setup.py values are updated too like setting project url, pushing it to debian/control, and so on.

And that's it, you have now a new rocking release, updated with all licensing and packaging issues done for you. Enjoy!

Change Launchpad project

If you want to unbind and bind again your project with another Launchpad one, you can issue this simple command:

$ quickly change-lp-project

It enables you to set or change the Launchpad project binded with the current ubuntu project.

Summary:

Ok, that's it for the tour, I hope you enjoyed it and it gave you some desire to use Quickly for your own project, develop new templates, and give new ideas!

In a nutshell, in two commands:

$ quickly create ubuntu-project myproject
$ quickly release

you can have a release of your project, licensed, packaged, under proper revision control. Easy and quick isn't?

Get Things Done Right and... Quickly!

More info on Quickly:

• project page: https://launchpad.net/quickly
• Quickly wiki page (will be updated soon with this tour content): https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Quickly
• Karmic Blueprint for Quickly: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-karmic-quickly
• Quickly IRC talk: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/devweek0909/QuicklyFun

• Previous part of the tour:

1. Part 1: introduction
2. Part 2: general concepts, core and templates
3. Part 3: getting help
4. Part 4: shell-completion
5. Part 5: miscellaneous core stuff
6. Part 6: creating templates
7. Part 7: ubuntu-project template presentation
8. Part 8: ubuntu-project template code editing

Press review:

• Quickly on LWN
• arstechnica review
• Maximum PC review

We previously saw the general concepts around Quickly and more particular its core.

So, now, it's time to dive into the different commands of the first Quickly template which is ubuntu-project.

What brings me ubuntu-project template?

To make programming easy and fun, we've made some opinionated^[1] choices about what tools, apis, etc.. to use.

In a nutshell:

• Python for the language
• pygtk for the UI framework
• Glade for the UI editor
• Gedit for the code editor (though this is easy for you to change if you choose another one)
• bzr for version control
• Launchpad for code hosting
• desktopcouch for storage/database (!)

ubuntu-project template adds some glue there to all those technologies to lower the barrel and facilitate the learning curve.

create command

The first command you will certainly use is to create an ubuntu-project "templated" project. You can just execute the following line to get a working project directory:

quickly create ubuntu-project Myproject

This causes a bunch of info to be dumped to the command line, but ends with the application being run. What Quickly does is to copy over basically a sample application, and do some text switcheroos to customize the application with the name provided.

Here is the obligatory screenshot of a newly created Quickly application without any change:

Note that in addition to the main dialog, you get a preferences and also an about dialog.

Under the hood, the command initiate a bzr repository and make a first commit to your project, this will enable you to track your changes and revert them later if needed, sharing the code on Launchpad, and so on... So, here it is, your project uses all previously described technology and is under revision control. You also have a nice .desktop file for showing your application in desktop menus for free. Enjoy! \o/

Then, we considerate that all subsequent commands will be run from a ubuntu-project "templated" project folder.

run command

If you've closed the application and want to run it again, change to your project directory, and use:

$ quickly run

This will run your project as a subprocess.

tutorial command

This command gives you the definitive must-have tutorial to know, indicating you what to do once your project is created, what can be changed, how to build it, etc. It goes also in some desktopcouch-db tweaking.

$ quickly tutorial

It will launch your default web browser and point you to a bunch of documentation to realize a successful ubuntu application.

Note that you can launch this command outside any project^[2] too by spawning:

$ quickly tutorial ubuntu-project

or:

$ quickly -t ubuntu-project tutorial

That's enough for today. It was rather short, but you have now plenty of stuff to discover by yourself: you can now create your own project and play with it. We won't cover here what lines to change into the default code of your project or how to add new couchdb storage as all of this is already described in the tutorial. We will rather focus on commands.

Next stop will be on how to edit/change the content of your software, and save your stuff at regular interval.