Michal Čihař - Archive for Sept. 27, 2007

You can read following text on SCons homepage:

SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.

Then they list tons of features. But why the hell it does not support DESTDIR like functionality out of the box? While googling for this I found that most projects add the same code to handle this feature that will be used by almost every Linux distribution. I think such feature should be built in into next-generation build tool.

PS: If you're asking what would I use, it is simple - for Python just use distutils, they do what you need, for rest I can recommend CMake.

PS2: I just need to express my disappointment after packaging pyexiv2 which uses scons.

As I have Pentax camera, I wanted to be able to extract information from maker notes it stores to EXIF. As only tool which seems to be capable of this is ExifTool and it is a Perl beast which I really don't want to use from Python, I need to add support for it to some existing library.

I found two which could be used - libexif and Exiv2. Because of availability of Python bindings I choose Exiv2. The reason why I also prefer this is upcoming XMP support for which I was looking recently. The only disadvantage I can see is that libexif is more widely used by applications. Why the hell couldn't be just one library doing this?

Anyway if you're interested in Pentax maker note support for Exiv2, you can find it in their bug tracker and it will hopefully appear soon in their svn ;-).

Today I did really big stress testing of Photo uploader - I needed to upload 400 photos (total size somewhere near 600 MiB). And it worked without problems! I could not imagine that I would have to upload so much files using web forms or some damn slow Windows application.

Also since last announcement uploader development went on. It now supports 4 services (all in Czechia for now), I added some documentation and man page. Also version 0.1 has been released yesterday (but it does not yet contain mentioned updates), with plan to release 0.2 somewhere next week.

And as I got quite a lot of requests for GUI - I do not plan to write one myself (or at least not soon). So if you want one, please write it. As all hard work is done by phoupl module, it can be easily embedded into some simple image viewer written in Python.