[OLPC-devel] Python bindings for tinymail, a call for help

[Philip Van Hoof]

With the help of Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro, James Livingston and Johan
Dahlin I've been implementing the Python binding work for tinymail.

You can find the source code for this binding work here:

https://svn.tinymail.org/svn/tinymail/trunk/bindings/python

You can find a sample E-mail client written in Python using tinymail
here:

https://svn.tinymail.org/svn/tinymail/trunk/libtinymail-test/tinymail-python-test.py

There's of course room for improvements. The binding indeed still needs
lots of testing. For example testing whether the garbage collector of
Python is doing things right (using overrides, you can tweak that a
little bit). Another example is implementing the sequence protocol for
Python bindings. This would make it possible to use lists returned by
tinymail as Python lists. James already committed some initial work for
this (for example, the list of headers in a folder and the tree of
folders in an account).

If somebody is interested in this, he's of course welcome. If certain
changes mean that it's necessary to make changes to the GObject/C code
of tinymail, know that I'm flexible about that: I believe higher
programming languages are far more important than my GObject/C code.

Like the OLPC team, I can't make promises about whether or not tinymail
will be used on the One Laptop Per Child laptop device.

The primary reason for these Python bindings is indeed acceptance by the
OLPC team. I indeed did this to give them one more reason to consider
tinymail as their E-mail framework. It being free software, this means
other projects and teams will of course enjoy the same bindings.

Know that not being a Python developer myself, I can use some help. I
also can't focus a lot on the Python bindings for a long time.

There's a huge amount of work before tinymail is what I really want it
to be. This doesn't mean that I disrespect Python developers or that I
don't care about them. This simply means that doing a E-mail framework
is a lot work. My ears will be wide open if Python developers tell me
what should change. I'm extremely interested in higher programming
languages and bringing the tinymail framework to developers that use
such programming languages.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend 
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be 
http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be