Python, os.fork(), webbrowser and debbugs
Written on 2007-07-01.
Gustavo writes about python, it's webbrowser module, os.fork and parsing bugreports from our BTS via html. This all sound very familiar, so here are some hints from me:
- You don't have to fork a new process just to call a browser, try threading
instead:
thread.start_new_thread(webbrowser.open, (url,))
. No need to clean up the child process after it has finished, just callstart_new_thread
with the function and it's parameters and forget it. - Python's webbrowser module is nice, but it often fails to find the right browser. The problem is to find the users (read: not the system's) default browser across the different desktop environments. xdg-open from the package xdg-utils (from freedesktop.org) seems to do a very good job. ~~Rng doesn't use it yet, but I'm definitely planning to replace the webbrowser call with xdg-open.~~ Rng uses it and falls back to python's webbrowser.open()-call if xdg-open failed.
- If your project suffers from changes in the html code of our BTS, try SOAP
instead. It provides all the infos in machine readable format and also comes
with backwards compatibility: the namespace for debbug's SOAP interface is
Debbugs/SOAP
which always calls the latest versions of the remote functions. But you can also useDebbugs/SOAP/V1
(Version 1 currently matchesDebbugs/SOAP
). This will ensure that changes in debbugs SOAP interface don't affect your implementation.
This entry was tagged reportbug-ng