Just a quick WIP teaser tonight:
Today I finally bit the bullet, and figured out all the necessary changes to get MediaSlurper running under Linux (though to be fair, I'm only really testing this under Kubuntu currently, but may soon also test under Manjaro for good measure)!
MediaSlurper GUI running under Kubuntu, with the "Foreland" wallpaper from Manjaro
What this entailed: Qué Significa?
Up till now, MediaSlurper had been developed under PySide6, as I'd been intending to try moving my upcoming Python projects off Riverbank Consulting's "PyQt" bindings, and onto the "PySide" bindings officially supported by the Qt project. (Among other reasons, was that it seemed better to try and reduce the number of vendors involved in the supply chain, especially with all the weird licensing crap that the PyQt libraries do pull for the Windows version)
However, as has become apparent tinkering with trying to set up a Python dev environment on Linux in the ways that I like dealing with them, much of the setups there are very much rooted in the "modern" and IMO over-complicated mindset of needing venvs and all that other crap.
As a result, much of the technical challenge of this exercise was really trying to figure out ways to set up my new base setups going forwards so that things work the way I want.
Key Requirements:
* I do not want to be forced to muck around with remembering a clunky invocation each time I want to do anything with any more my personal self-developed tools that I use / develop (interchangeably - sometimes going from "using" mode, to "developing / hacking / fixing" mode)
* I do not want have to keep reinstalling my "base" libraries for each and every project I work on - given that I do tend to minimise my dependencies, and pretty much stick to the same set every time
* Hopefully I don't hose my environment in the process
* I want to minimise toolkit lock-in, allowing me to keep running my tools across all my various machines (which have varying Python versions and/or sets of toolkits/libraries installed) - Again, it is my belief that quality software is software that is more resilient + tolerant of operating environment: Specifically, if it's just a small adaptation/bridge away, why should we not try to add the small workaround that ensures that the codebase can be run across a broader range of setups...
Result:
I've now got it using the "QtPy" wrapper for abstracting away the details of actually importing from these Python bindings. This way, either one can be used (without having to reconfigure any of my other machines).
To install that:
* On Kubuntu:
sudo apt install python3-qtpy
* On Windows:
pip install qtpy
Notes:
* Kubuntu's setup is such that "pip" is effectively useless (unless you have one of those new style "venv" setups for that project.
* Kubuntu requires prefixing the Python interpreter as benig explicitly "python3" - Which TBH isn't that bad, considering that OpenSuse was pretty much an unusable mess demanding that you explicitly the major + minor version numbers
Other General Notes:
In general, lots of less visible stuff has been happening in MediaSlurper world since my last update a while ago.
Much of these have been out of necessity - i.e. needing to use it on various "temporary" devices while my main machine was out of commission (due to physical access restrictions due to the roadworks). To name a few:
* Being able to restrict downloads to only those occurring past a certain date-time.
NOTE: This unfortunately only applies to only the Camera targets. Moving that support to all the other targets is of course something to be tackled laterl
* A whole bunch of fixes to make the tools more robust
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