What patches are 'vital' to your use of Gramps 5.1.x?

What are the patches that you considered ‘so vital’ that they had to be applied after upgrading to 5.1.4?

Here’s my preliminary ‘must have’ list:

Obviously, any 5.1.4 breakages:

Enhancements:

Making the “new user experience” easier is part of the obligation to growing the community to keep it viable. The following items may not be important for your use. But the community needs every user to remember their baptism by fire with Gramps and suggest improvements.

  • Welcome Gramplet updates - this gramplet needs a LOT of people looking at it before it is locked down for another year or two.

Reduce distracting console messages for Beta testing:

  • AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'post_create' : PR #1377
  • Error upon Adding Bookmarks to Geography view PR #1398
  • Move the Database is Closed message from Warnings to Debug PR #1311
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Are you asking for priorities for another maintenance release (5.1.5), or for 5.2.0, or …?

Nope,

I’m asking about which patches people are adding BEFORE the next release. (I use this posting as a checklist if I need to reinstall.)

It has been nearly a year since the last maintenance release. And there is significant work still outstanding on the 5.2 targets.

With that in mind, it might be another year before the next update. So the question is… which patches will you apply in the meantime?

Well, definitively there should be some interim releases. I can’t understand why an obvious (and trivial) bug like the one for long/lat doesn’t trigger a new build - I definitely would if I was a developper. Not everybody is tech savvy enough to apply these manually (even if I am)

I am not arguing either direction.

But there are ALWAYS significant issues in any complex software. And the Lat/Long swap only affects a ‘convenience’… a feature that simplifies data entry… not the functionality of maps nor the integrity of the data being stored.

If something is discovered that presents a large risk to the research of the average user, then an emergency update would certainly be warranted. Similarly, if it would create a small injury to the majority of users.

This particular item doesn’t cross that threshold.

Maybe not vital, but for me personally, this one was a big deal, I havent tried 5.1.4 yet but if it isnt included, I will manually add it as I had on 5.1.3, as it makes the note view so much more usefull for me.

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There was a Name & ID conflict with 5.1.4 in that Note Gramplet for the Notes view.

So Matt amended the original with another patch in July. That update is in the same thread.

Make certain you don’t just work from patches described in old eMails.

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I patched both breakages since they are very annoying. I hope there will be another maintenance release soon to fix them for all users.

Releases are a lot of work and require serveral people (for all the OS supported) even if the changes are minor.

I’m glad that adding the NoteView note gramplet was very usefull to you! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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I have no idea whether there is one, but when I want to add a Gramplet on Linux, in Cinnamon, I have no scroll arrows in the pop-up, so I can’t pick one from the bottom of the list if the list is longer than my screen height.
The arrows do appear in Windows 10.

That sounds like a good bug report if missing scrollbars for the Gramplet Bar Menu Add a gramplet can be reproduced in 5.1.4 version. I would expect that this code has been touched a few times since the 3.4.9 version you’ve been using though.

However, maybe it is time to revisit the decision to use a menu there? With the volume of add-ons, maybe a searchable (with info and Help access for each addon) selector (something akin to the Plugin Manager Advanced) would be more effective?

Re scroll arrows; This sounds like it might be the disappearing scrollbars that recent Gnome systems are using in their themes. If you move the cursor to near the right edge of the list ,does the scrollbar/arrows appear? Alternatively, I think you should be able to use the arrow keys to scroll through the list.

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I tried both, but they don’t appear when I move the cursor to the right place, and using the arrow keys doesn’t help either, because I don’t see any focused item.

They are visible in the older Linux that I run Gramps 3.4.9 on, for my daily use, and that has another theme, Mint-X instead of Mint-Y.

See also 0012413: Add gramplet pop-up does not show arrows for scrolling - Gramps - Bugtracker – Free Genealogy Software

Be careful (I learned this the hard way), if you install this change for 5.1.3 or 5.1.4, you need to change this line in the gramps/plugins/gramplet/gramplet.gpr.py file from 5.2 back to 5.1:

MODULE_VERSION=“5.2”

Otherwise, the gramplets won’t register and Gramps will hang when you try to navigate from the dashboard to any of the category views.

To be safe, when you open Gramps after installing the changes, go to Help - Plugin Manager and make sure all of the Notes gramplets appear there.

I agree, it is a very useful change, thanks @Mattkmmr!

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And of course, one should always be careful about adding any new code to an older installation. Just forcing the version number, as in that example, doesn’t magically make the code backwardly compatible, it just tricks your current installation of Gramps into trying to use it. Also, a given file may have been updated for more than one patch.

7 posts were split to a new topic: Feature preview hack: Custom Map provider tiles

@GeorgeWilmes

Could you look if there is a bug report filed? And if not, file one?

I suppose that it is arguable that if you’re techie enough to manually install, you should be responsible for the problems you create.

But it seems reasonable that since the .gpr.py registration system demands versioning info, it should be able to handle version mismatches in a more graceful manner than a hang.

You might mark it as related to feature request 9677: Make “help_url” an option for all plugins and addons. (Registration currently errors out if a help_url is defined for any add-on type other than Gramplets)

I don’t think it’s a bug. The file in the 5.1.4 release has “5.1”. I imagine there are other files in the current master branch that aren’t intended for release until 5.2? But I don’t know how to check.

Now, if there is a 5.1.5 release someday and that file somehow gets distributed with “5.2” in it, that would be a bug. But if a given release never contains files that are targeted for future releases, then I don’t think any effort should be put into building protection from that scenario.

I agree with you that anyone who applies their own patches needs to be careful and responsible.

You can use Matt’s new site to look for add-ons specifically for 5.2 (or any other version)

It’s generally better to have a graceful fail with prerequisites check instead of a hang with no feedback. But adding that sort of precautionary error handling adds a lot code to a program. It is a judgement call.

7 posts were split to a new topic: Feature preview hack: Custom Map provider tiles

Thank you @SNoiraud, I will wait for 5.2. As I mentioned earlier, it [the “custom map provider tiles” hack] is not a “vital patch” for me, I was just curious to try it.

To return now to @emyoulation’s original question:

Other patches I currently have (besides some of the ones already mentioned by others above) are these:

A post was merged into an existing topic: Feature preview hack: Custom Map provider tiles