GTG SoC, week 2 — GNOME's Next Top Model

by Paul Kishimoto on 7 June 2010 - 5:18pm in:

Following on my last week's work mapping the Getting Things GNOME! data model, week 2 of my GSoC experience involved preparing this somewhat-lengthy analysis of how we store tasks in GTG, and how it should change. Of course, it doesn't hold a candle to things like the 168-page iCalendar RFC...of which a good ten percent is devoted to the recurrence specification grammar for VEVENTs and VTODOs.

Needless to say, I recommended we find a more straightforward way of solving this bug. To make you read the actual analysis, I won't give away my other conclusions here!

I have also started a page for user stories to guide future development, and begun moving around large blocks of code to start to tease apart the user-facing and core portions of GTG.

Some questions for the Planet hive mind:

Which is preferred idiom — import sys; sys.exit(1) or raise SystemExit(1)? The latter avoids an import...
Likewise, most modern PyGTK applications include a pygtk.require('2.0') wrapped in a try/except clause. Is this suggested/required in every file that imports gtk, only the lowest level, or only once per application (presumably in the root or top-level UI module)?

1. I prefer import sys;

1. I prefer import sys; sys.exit(1).
oh noes, we're going to import a module! :P sys will probably get imported by some other part of your application anyway.
I would only do this as part of your top-level main function.
e.g.:

def main():
    if something_bad_happened:
        return 1

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    sys.exit(main())

(you might also like to pass sys.args to main, too)

2. The latter.

—Peter Ward (not verified), 7 June 2010 - 6:18pm

Isn't the

Isn't the pygtk.require('2.0') thing something that was used for the Gtk+ 1.x to 2.x transition? I've never bothered with it myself, and can't imagine it serves any useful purpose unless you're running an old distro that still provides a pre-2.x version of PyGtk.

—Simon (not verified), 7 June 2010 - 6:44pm