Vim tips for SWIG

I've ever annoyed with the mixed tab and spaces in SWIG's code. Just talked it with William Fulton in #swig-gsoc. He suggested some tips.

This is a way to specific coding style by project:

au BufRead */[SWIG|swig]*/* set tabstop=8 | set shiftwidth=2 | set softtabstop=2 | set expandtab " SWIG

And a Syntax file for SWIG, add this in ~/.vimrc or ~/.vim/filetype.vim to use it:

" SWIG filetype file
if exists("did_load_filetypes")
   finish
endif
augroup filetypedetect
   au! BufRead,BufNewFile *.swg  setfiletype swig
   au! BufRead,BufNewFile *.i    setfiletype swig
augroup END

Finally, a big thanks to William! :)

Yeah, sigfaults disappered!

Finally I have solved most of the segmentation faults in yesterday's midnight. Just two lines of code!

Now I understood that PyObject_New() only allocate memory, but haven't do the works like creating the object's __dict__ and etc. We should use PyBaseObject_Type.tp_new() to create a "full" object. Or maybe PyType_GenericNew() also works?

Another mistake I've made is using obj->tp_dict() directly to access the object's dict. *Must* use _PyObject_GetDictPtr() instead! Otherwise, we only get the dict of the object's type!

Well done, now more than 90% test cases passed! Cheers!

Looked into the failed testcases

I've just looked into the failed testcases these days. Reasons of the failures can be fallen into below several categories:

• PyInstance_NewRaw: should find a replacement
• A lot of things related to the Unicode string changes
• IO module changed (see PEP 3116), some PyFile_* dissappeared
  
• How to define swig::LANGUAGE_OBJ?
• Some old testcases code should be rewritten (eg. they should raises an exception object instead of a string)
• Exception implementation: in Python 3 all excetion classes must inherit from BaseException, so we can't directly use a C/C++ struct as an exception now.

This would be a todo-list for me in the next weeks.

Trying some cool Firefox addons

Every time I browse the Firefox Add-ons page, I can discovery something cool. These are the things I found today:

• Interclue: It shows a preview window when your mouse stay on a link, so you can see the page behind the link without open it. It also can provide viewing for images, and YouTube videos.
• YouPlayer: A video palyer with playlist. It stay in a sidebar of Firefox, so you can watch video while browsing web pages. However, I think it is more convenient to play video in a floating window.
• ScribeFire: Writing blog directly in Firefox, without open a web page. This blog is written using it. It is a bit more powerful than Blogger's blog editor.
  
• FaviconizeTab: "Faviconize" the tabs to save the tab bars space. Not sure it is useful, just trying.
  

These are the new addons in my Firefox. I like to try out various addons, sometime they amazed me a lot.

The test suite and disable 2to3 fixers

I'm writing SWIG makefile rules for testing today. Now I can see the test progress running well when I type "make check-python3-test-suite". It wonders me that so many tests can be passed! However, the failed tests should be the hardest part.

I have spend some time to work on Python 3's relative import, which mentioned on PEP 328, and PEP 366 seems a solution to my problem. But there is no 2to3 fixer to apply the PEP 366, so I had to disable the "import" fixer. The 2to3 has no option to disable a fixer now, so, this is how I did that:

$ 2to3 `2to3 -l | grep -v -E "Available|import$" | awk '{print "-f "$0}'` foo.py

This is the first time I tried to use awk, and the first time to write such a complicated command line. However, there should be a more clever way to do it.

The test suite still running, very slow, maybe due to that awful command line?

Auto-bracketing within Vim

The AutoClose Vim script inserts matching brackets automatically. It is useful for me, since I am lazy. But what annoying me is the script runs buggy in my Linux box. When I press , it often overwrite my program with a lot of brackets!

I looked into its codes, and commented out these two lines of code:

      "inoremap <silent> <Esc> <C-R>=<SID>CloseStackPop('')<CR><Esc>
     "inoremap <silent> <C-[> <C-R>=<SID>CloseStackPop('')<CR><C-[>

Now it works well! Cheers!

My own SVN branch! (and "svn merge")

Thanks to William, I have set up my own SVN branch now! Previous modifications also committed when starting the branch.

But unluckily since I did "svn cp" on my local working copy, but forgot "svn up" before it. So I have branched an older revision (r10394), and SWIG trunk's head revision is r10404 now!

So I tried to merge changes from trunk. I did:

$ svn merge -r 10394:10404 ../../trunk

But there are many annoying "Skipped Examples/python/shadow/some_file " lines, mostly occurred when "Examples/python/shadow" was deleted. After google, seems it means there are non version controlled files in these directory, so svn decide to keep them.

A dirty solution is:

$ rm -rf gsoc2008-bhy
$ svn co https://swig.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/swig/branches/gsoc2008-bhy

Then redo the merge, everything works well.