Posts tagged with "BagOfStuff"

I've just made a small update to BagOfStuff, my little support library for my personal Python-based FOSS projects. This release makes some more changes to the history classes, adding an add_or_replace method, and also making some improvements to the type hinting by basing the classes on MutableSequence rather than Sequence.

While the history classes were originally intended to feel immutable, it's obvious that they're really not. The idea was that stuff gets added to them, stuff falls off the other end, and stuff might disappear depending on the context and when stuff gets added. The general idea was that direct manipulation was something that wouldn't happen. So I'd started out with them inheriting from Sequence, and so implying they were a read-only interface.

Given this acknowledgement, they now inherit from MutableSequence. This means that some extra (dunder) methods are added, and it also means that some extra exceptions can be raised. For example: setting slices to iterables isn't supported and will raise a NotImplementedError. Some other slice-based operations aren't supported either.

While this is close to a breaking change, it's fine for my use of this code. However, I had to make one big breaking change: I'd written clear so that it returned Self¹. The interface expected by MutableSequence is one that returns None. So to strictly comply with that interface, I've changed the return type.

With this being a breaking change, I've bumped the library version to v2.0.0. While it's really a small change, and only one I'd notice, there's no getting away from the fact that the API has changed. That deserves a major version bump.

For a wee while now I've been trying to nail down a weirdness with the navigation history in Rogallo. I never felt it was a difficult issue to deal with, but it was also one of those issues that I could never obviously recreate at will, and it only seemed to happen while I was busy working on something else.

Yesterday evening I finally managed to come up with a way to always recreate it and, having done so, the solution seems pretty straightforward¹. In order to implement the tweak I want, I need to be able to truncate the navigation history, and of course do so in a non-destructive way.

So the history classes in BagOfStuff v1.3.0 have grown clone and truncate methods. This will allow me to duplicate a history, truncate it at its current location, then save it, without affecting the working copy.

Quick bump to BagOfStuff. v1.2.0 adds something I totally forgot yesterday.

While adding the del method to the history classes, to make it easier for me to manipulate them as if they had the interface of a Python list, I totally forgot to add a clear method. Rogallo will need to be able to 100% clear history, as well as remove individual entries in the history, so that's kind of needed too.

It's there now.

I've just updated BagOfStuff with a change and addition, in anticipation of some work I'll be doing on Rogallo in the near future. The change is a small and simple one, adding del support to the history classes.

The addition is a simple cache manager. For now it's just a straightforward bit of code that, given a set of keyword arguments, creates a unique hash, sets up a directory, and returns a base filename within it. From there, any calling code can detect if the file(s) exist and make use of it/them, or otherwise get on with some work and populate the cache.

Of course, in the case of Rogallo, this is all going to be used to cache the Gemtext that is retrieved from capsules.

BagOfStuff started as a very small side project when I was working on OldNews during my winter break, and then into the new year. It began as some support code in OldNews, which was living in a sort of tools section of the codebase (you know: the dreaded and much-maligned utils section of the project). Sensing that something in it could end up being of utility elsewhere, I moved it out into its own library.

Having written some history-management type of code for the Gemini protocol client I'm working on, I got to thinking that it too should move into this library; a benefit here being that I'll eventually migrate Hike's histories to this. With that done, I've decided to promote BagOfStuff to v1.0.0 and call it stable.

I don't see this library growing too much; the old days of languages either having a spartan standard library, or a third-party ecosystem that lacks comprehensive coverage, are pretty far behind us, and Python suffers from neither issue. On the other hand, there are some general-but-niche things that I'm going to want for my own projects, which probably don't deserve a library in their own right, which can live in here.

Also, sometimes, it's fun to just jam on a little problem and try to make the personally-ideal approach to solving it. BagOfStuff serves that purpose too.