zim cgi won't run without gobject

[Dan Connolly]

To reproduce:

1. grab zim-0.44 sources, unpack
2. invoke zim.cgi
3. lose/crash/traceback as below

Is there any particular reason why the cgi script depends on gobject?

I'm going to see if I can remove this dependency.

$ ./zim.cgi
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./zim.cgi", line 30, in <module>
    from zim.config import data_dir
  File "/u/2/connolly/src/zim-0.44/zim/__init__.py", line 24, in <module>
    import gobject
ImportError: No module named gobject

[Dan Connolly (connolly)]

I should have made the description "zim.cgi won't run in pure-python environment". The way I first ran into this problem was when trying to access a notebook from a mac.

[Dan Connolly (connolly)]

I thought maybe WWWInterface didn't really need to depend on gobject,
so I tried this patch... I'll show the (failing) results in another attachment.

[Dan Connolly (connolly)]

This shows that WWWInterface seems to use gobject stuff such as .emit and .connect_after; I'm still not sure why, but I guess it's not as simple as I initially thought.

[Jaap Karssenberg (jaap.karssenberg)]

I'm afraid zim will always need gobject, since it is used for event based code in all components (not only the gui parts). This is a design choice. Is there a problem with just installing gobject ?

[Dan Connolly (connolly)]

Mac OS comes with python, but it doesn't come with a C compiler. So pure-python stuff is *much* easier to deal with on a Mac. The other day I spent a couple hours trying to get the right version of the OS X developer tools installed on a machine that didn't have quite the latest Mac operating system.

So yes, there's a problem "just" installing gobject.

One of the things I like about Zim is that the storage format is reasonably simple text files that I should be able to manipulate with lots of ordinary tools. I figured I could develop my own pure-python web interface to the data. I thought zim.cgi would save me the effort, but if it depends on gobject, it doesn't quite meet my needs.

[Jaap Karssenberg (jaap.karssenberg)]

There is a point to be made that data backend should work without depending on glib, however this will be low priority action.

Please note that you can use mac ports to obtain a version of python and glib bindings precompiled. See the installation notes on the web page for details.