Python-GTK regression: How to catch mouse button release (Shallow Thoughts)

Python-GTK regression: How to catch mouse button release

We just had the second earthquake in two days, and I was chatting with someone about past earthquakes and wanted to measure the distance to some local landmarks. So I fired up PyTopo as the easiest way to do that. Click on one point, click on a second point and it prints distance and bearing from the first point to the second.

Except it didn't. In fact, clicks weren't working at all. And although I have hacked a bit on parts of pytopo (the most recent project was trying to get scaling working properly in tiles imported from OpenStreetMap), the click handling isn't something I've touched in quite a while.

It turned out that there's a regression in PyGTK: mouse button release events now need you to set an event mask for button presses as well as button releases. You need both, for some reason. So you now need code that looks like this:

drawing_area.connect("button-release-event", button_event)
drawing_area.set_events(gtk.gdk.EXPOSURE_MASK |
                        # next line wasn't needed before:
                        gtk.gdk.BUTTON_PRESS_MASK |
                        gtk.gdk.BUTTON_RELEASE_MASK )

An easy fix ... once you find it.

I filed bug 606453 to see whether the regression was intentional.

I've checked in the fix to the PyTopo svn repository on Google Code. It's so nice having a public source code repository like that! I'm planning to move Pho to Google Code soon.

Tags: programming, python, pygtk, mapping, pytopo
[ 14:20 Jan 08, 2010    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]