Not Even My Wife Reads This

I switched Slugathon from libglade to gtk.Builder back in August, using gtk-builder-convert on the XML files, then a few small boillerplate API changes in the Python code.

Just noticed today that a few dialogs weren't working correctly anymore. (This is the problem with waiting until something is "done" to actually release it — you have to find all the bugs yourself.)

The differences introduced were missing action-widget tags for some buttons, and changes in the ordering of the children within the dialog ActionArea.

Once I figured out what had happened, it was trivial to fix things up. But be sure to test all your dialogs after running gtk-builder-convert. Slugathon has unit tests, but they don't cover the user interface, so I didn't notice the bugs until I played a long test game to verify other changes.

I've been using Python 2.6 (and 2.6.1) as my primary Python in Gentoo for months, but it was hard masked until a couple of days ago, which meant nobody except developers and crazy people was supposed to use it. Now it's finally unmasked and in unstable (~x86, ~amd64, etc.), so it's recommended for people who are only slightly brave. Just in time for 2.6.2 to come out so everyone can upgrade again in a few days.

Lots of distributions write a lot of really important tools in Python (such as Gentoo's portage package manager), so they tend to be really conservative about upgrading it. I remember finally giving up on Red Hat when RH 7.3 still shipped the ancient 1.5.2 as the default Python. (Of course I'm still stuck using Red Hat at work. And they still ship a seriously outdated Python version, though I have to admit 2.4 isn't nearly as bad as 1.5.2.) Now I just have to wait for Ubuntu and Red Hat and Debian and Mac OS to upgrade, so I can use 2.6 features in Slugathon without feeling like I'm asking my hypothetical users to jump through too many hoops.