[Mageia] Chronicle in May

It’s been a very long time since you’ve heard from us on this blog. Now it’s time to give you some fresh news, because no matter what it seems, a lot of work has been done since then. Organization Many teams — the dev and QA teams in particular — are now working on a schedule for the upcoming Mageia 8. It is now available online. It seems this summer is going to be all about testing our new release! You can already take part in the testing and check if all of our Drak tools are functioning properly, and help the QA team. The coming months should allow us to report any new bugs or update existing reports in our Bugzilla. If you are comfortable working with Perl, your coding skills will be much appreciated to help correcting all the known bugs in our Drak tools. [...] A security alert has been published concerning our current version of LibreOffice, which is also EOL at the end of the month… Therefore, LibreOffice’s latest version 6.4.4 has been built and is currently being thoroughly tested.

Sunsetting XRandR Brightness

One of the first features I added back then was smooth brightness changes. PowerDevil supports three ways of changing screen brightness: through XRandR configuration, through DDC (display data channel, for desktop monitors, experimental and not built by default), and by writing to sysfs (/sys/class/backlight or /sys/class/leds). Since the latter requires privileges and uses a helper binary through KDE’s KAuth framework, I only implemented the animation for the XRandR code path, which was executed in the same process. Obviously, XRandR doesn’t work on Wayland, and it seems that modern graphics drivers don’t support changing brightness through it anymore either. I recently sat down and wrote a patch to have the helper binary execute a similar animation. KAuth works quite magically by exposing methods defined in an .actions file through DBus and then calling them as slots through Qt’s meta object. Unfortunately, the way it is designed doesn’t allow for delayed replies, which I wanted to use so the job only finished once the animation was completed in order to keep PowerDevil’s state consistent. I then found that KAuth randomly keeps its helper running for 10 seconds, more than enough for a 250ms animation.

Python Programming

• Reporting Exceptions in Python Scripts with Sentry

  Python scripts are the glue that keep many applications and their infrastructure running, but when one of your scripts throws an exception you may not know about it immediately unless you have a central place to aggregate the errors. That's where adding Sentry can solved this distributed error logging problem. In this tutorial, we'll see how to quickly add Sentry to a new or existing Python script to report errors into a centralized location for further debugging.

• Luke Plant: Keyword-only arguments in Python

  Keyword-only arguments are a feature that has been around since Python 3.0. But I’ve seen and used them much less use that I could have. They are described in PEP 3102, which is pretty readable, but I think they could benefit from more exposure with examples and rationale.

• Creating and Modifying PDF Files in Python

  The PDF, or Portable Document Format, is one of the most common formats for sharing documents over the Internet. PDFs can contain text, images, tables, forms, and rich media like videos and animations, all in a single file. This abundance of content types can make working with PDFs difficult. There are a lot of different kinds of data to decode when opening a PDF file! Fortunately, the Python ecosystem has some great packages for reading, manipulating, and creating PDF files.

• Will McGugan: Rich gets Richer

  Since my last post on Rich there have been a number of improvements. [...] Coverage has reached 97% which is not bad at all. To be honest though it is the use of type annotations throughout which gives me the most confidence.