Yesterday, GUADEC hosted a PyGObject hackfest. I was really happy to see so many participants, and a lot of whom who are rather new to the project. I originally feared that it would just be the core crew of four people, as this is not exactly the shiniest part of GNOME development.

So I did not work on the stuff I was planning for, but instead walked around and provided mentoring, help, and patch review. Unfortunately I do not know all the results from the participants, hopefully they will blog some details themselves. But this is what I was involved in:

• Manuel Quiñones added an gtk_tree_view_column_set_attributes() override (the original C function uses varargs and thus is not introspectable). Most time was spent figuring out an appropriate test case.
• I showed Didier Roche some tricks about porting a pygtk application to PyGI/GTK3. He gave a shot to porting Meld, but unfortunately it uses a lot of pygtk hacks/tricks, most of which are obsolete now. So this proved too big a project for one day eventually 🙁
• Paolo and I guided Marta Maria Casetti, one of this year’s GNOME GSoC students, through her first pygobject patch. The test case still needs some love (again, nothing regarding GtkTreeView is easy), but the actual patch is good. Thanks Marta for participating, and not getting intimidated by all the new stuff!
• While working on above patch, Marta encountered a rather curious TypeError: Expected Gtk.TreeViewColumn, but got GObjectMeta when writing the override. What seemed to be a trivial problem at first quickly turned into an one-hour debugging session involving grandmaster John Palmieri and me, with others chipping in as well. In the end it (of course!) turned out to be a trivial four-character change in Marta’s patch, but it was fun to get to understand the problem (a loong-forgotten special case of overrides resolution in overrides code). Now pygobject gives a proper error message which is actually helpful, i. e. which argument causes the problem and which module/class/method is provided, which should prevent us from being misguided into the totally wrong direction the next time this happens.
• John Stowers got the Windows build working again, and showed off the gtk-demo under Windows. This is really amazing, I hope we can get that into trunk soon and not let it bitrot again for so long. Thanks!
• Simon and Manuel worked on porting some Sugar extensions. Together with Paolo we also discussed the GStreamer 1.0 API a bit, which parts can become API additions and which need to become overrides.
• Michal Hruby debugged a leak in the handling of GVariant arrays when using libdee.

Thanks everyone for participating! I hope everyone enjoyed it and got to learn a new thing or two. See you at the next one!

PyGObject hackfest at GUADEC 2012