[Unreleased addon]Tecknicaltom's Ancestry gramplet

Development
1

I’ve been trying to use, and hopefully further develop, this addon: GitHub - tecknicaltom/AncestryCitations . But I can’t get it to do anything other than show this:

Screenshot_2025-08-28_16-39-00_gramplet
Screenshot_2025-08-28_16-39-00_gramplet400×857 5.44 KB

I’ve tried selecting people, events, citations, sources. I’ve tried dragging and dropping them in. I’ve tried right clicking in the area where it seems like something should show up.

At least one person on this forum recommended this addon–that’s how I found out about it–so I assume it must work under certain circumstances. It hasn’t been updated since it was first uploaded to Github, and its target version of Gramps is 5.0. I always edit the .gpr.py file to reflect the version of Gramps I’m using, so that’s not the issue (although deeper compatibility may well be).

My host system is running Linux Mint 22.1, Cinnamon version 6.4.8, and I’m using the gramps-6.0.0.deb package from the Gramps website. Here are the results of Prerequisites Checker:

REQUIRED
Installations of the following packages are ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED
(Requires the minimum version or greater.):
• Python 3.12.3 (Passed: version 3.9.0 or greater installed.)
• orjson 3.9.15 (Passed: version 3.8.5 or greater installed.)
• GTK+ 3.24.41 (Passed: version 3.24.0 or greater installed.)
• PyGObject 3.48.2 (Passed: version 3.29.0 or greater installed.)
• Cairo 1.18.0 (Passed: version 1.13.1 or greater installed.)
• Pycairo 1.25.1 (Passed: version 1.13.3 or greater installed.)
• Pango 1.52.1 (Passed: version 1.29.3 or greater installed.)
• PangoCairo 1.0
• Berkeley Database library (bsddb3: 5.3.28) (Python-bsddb3 : 6.2.9)
• SQLite Database library (sqlite3: 3.45.1)
• xdg-utils (Manual check see instructions link)
• librsvg2 (Manual check see instructions link)
• language-pack-gnome-xx (Manual check see instructions link) for your Language

RECOMMENDED
Installations of the following packages are STRONGLY RECOMMENDED as necessary for Geography and Charts:
• osmgpsmap 1.0 (Passed: version 1.0 or greater installed.)
• Graphviz 2.43
• PyICU not found but we have ICU 3.12.2
• Ghostscript 10.02.1
• python-fontconfig not found, (Requires version 0.5.x)

Nothing about the Ancestry gramplet shows up under “Optional packages required by Third-party Addons.”

I also have the git repository cloned on a virtual machine running MX Linux 23, KDE Plasma version 5.27.5, where I’m doing my developing, and I’ve run both maintenance/gramps51 and maintenance/gramps60 from source inside a Python virtual environment. (I tried running maintenance/gramps50 but I think I’ll need a new virtual environment for that one, I got so many errors.) Nothing prints to the console when I try to use the Ancestry gramplet that doesn’t print otherwise. Here are the results of the Prerequisites Checker when running maintenance/gramps51:

REQUIREMENTS
The following packages MUST be installed (Requires the minimum version or greater.):

  • Python 3.11.2 (Passed: version 3.3.0 or greater installed.)
  • GTK+ 3.24.38 (Passed: version 3.12.0 or greater installed.)
  • PyGObject 3.42.2 (Passed: version 3.12.0 or greater installed.)
  • Cairo 1.16.0 (Passed: version 1.13.1 or greater installed.)
  • Pycairo 1.28.0 (Passed: version 1.13.3 or greater installed.)
  • Pango 1.50.12 (Passed: version 1.29.3 or greater installed.)
  • PangoCairo 1.0
  • Berkeley Database library (bsddb3: not found) (Python-bsddb3 : not found)
  • SQLite Database library (sqlite3: 3.40.1) (Python-sqlite3: 2.6.0)
  • xdg-utils (Manual check see instructions link)
  • librsvg2 (Manual check see instructions link)
  • language-pack-gnome-xx (Manual check see instructions link) for your Language

STRONGLY RECOMMENDED
The following packages are STRONGLY RECOMMENDED to be installed (needed for geography and charts):

  • osmgpsmap 1.0 (Passed: version 1.0 or greater installed.)
  • Graphviz 2.43
  • PyICU not found(ICU not found)
  • Ghostscript 10.00.0
  • python-fontconfig not found, (Requires version 0.5.x)

Again, nothing about the gramplet under “Optional packages required by Third-party Addons.”

So, first question: what does this gramplet do, exactly, when functional? And second question: is there an easy fix I’m missing here, or is it time to put on my developer hat?

2

I just took a very quick look at the code. It will display a table of participants for an event with the citation that is currently active. So I suggest that you select a citation that is connected to an event.

Then you should see a table of people where you can edit the ID column. This creates and updates an attribute for the people.

No extra dependencies are required. It looks like it should work on v6.0, but it needs testing.

1 Like
3

Tom’s original message

The proof of concept: So I’ve created a proof of concept to tackle this problem. It consists of some changes to the gedcom exporter, and an optional gramplet to make data entry easier.

[Gramps-devel] Gramps and Ancestry hints - a proof of concept | Gramps

4

Thank you! That clarifies a lot. My personal use case is more about importing from Ancestry into Gramps rather than the other way around, so I’ll probably focus on creating my own addon(s) rather than debugging this one, although I’ll keep it in mind. (I’ll make a separate post about that before I do anything substantial.)

1 Like