enthought/pyface 8.0.0

Pyface 8.0.0

on GitHub

Highlights of this release

This is a major release which removes a number of things which have been deprecated for a number of years. The most significant change in this release is that the Qt toolkit backend has been moved from the pyface.ui.qt4 package to the pyface.ui.qt package. The "qt4" namespace had been an ongoing source of confusion as Qt5 and Qt6 became the most popular versions of Qt in use. Because this change has the potential to cause significant backwards compatibility issues, this release includes import hooks to continue to support imports from pyface.ui.qt4... which can be enabled by:

• using "qt4" for the ETS_TOOLKIT or ETSConfig.toolkit values.
• setting the ETS_QT4_IMPORT environment variable to a non-empty value
• explicitly adding the import hooks to sys.meta_path

In particular the environment variables allow users of ETS-based applications such as Mayavi to continue to use those applications with newer versions of Pyface until there is time to update their code to the new import locations.

Additionally this release uses the module-level __getattr__ system introduced in Python 3.7 to delay imports from the api modules which have side-effects, particularly toolkit selection. This means that you can, for example, import pyface.api and toolkit selection will be deferred until you actually request a class or object which is toolkit-dependent. Part of this included adding formal interfaces for ActionManager and its subclasses

In addition this release:

• adds support for Python 3.11 and drops support for Python 3.6
• adds support for PySide 6.4+ and the new enum system
• removes code supporting PyQt4, and supports more modern imports from
  pyface.qt, such as pyface.qt.QtWidgets.
• removes many things flagged as deprecated in Pyface 7
• consistently add interface classes to api modules.
• adds new Field subclasses, including an ImageField and LabelField
• moves to a pyproject.toml-based packaging solution, removing setup.py

Detailed changes

Thanks to:

• Mark Dickinson
• Dominik Gresch
• JaRoSchm
• Rahul Poruri
• Corran Webster

Features

• Refactor IField and add IImageField and ILabelField Field classes (#1234)
• Move pyface.ui.qt4 to pyface.ui.qt (#1223, #1228)
• Delayed imports with side-effects in api modules; new interfaces for
  ActionManager and its subclasses (#1229)

Enhancements

• Better handling of sizes for multiple (or no) screens (#1237)
• More arguments for the confirm function (#1221)
• Expose interfaces in api modules and other improvemnts to api modules
  (#1220, #1222, #1229)
• remove deprecated modules and code (#1209, #1215)
• PySide 6.5 support (#1238)
• Python 3.11 and PySide 6.4 support (#1210)

Fixes

• Always use a no-delay timer for GUI invoke_later and
  set_trait_later on Qt (#1226)
• Work arounds for some end-of-process segfaults on PySide < 6.4.3 (#1214)
• Use exec instead of exec_ where possible (#1208)
• Emit a warning rather than asserting in SplitTabWidget (#1192)
• Remove required parent argument in Wx StatusBarManager (#1192)
• Use integer division in DockSplitter.draw (#1190)

Documentation

• general updates and enhancements (#1238)
• update copyright dates (#1191)

CI

• remove setup.py and use pyproject.toml (#1203, #1214)