[scribus] A few scripter issues

[Henry Hartley]

I'm working on an update to my calendar script and have a couple comments and questions. If I've missed anything obvious (or even not obvious), please let me know. For reference, I've been running the 1.3.5svn snapshot from July 2008 on Windows XP (SP3) (but see the last item below). In no particular order:

* When I run my script, which takes a few minutes to run, I'd like to
  switch tasks while its running (i.e. write an e-mail). Unfortunately,
  when I put the focus on another application, the scripter keeps
  taking me back to Scribus. If I turn off all status messages and
  progress indications in my script, it's not quite so bad (it still
  takes the focus away from what I'm doing although it doesn't actually
  put focus on Scribus). It still prevents me from doing pretty much
  anything else. I see this is a reported bug so I'll just say, me too
  and that it applies to WinXP http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=2948

* I like having the ability to query the user for certain things. It
  lets me make one script and then decide which of a number of options
  I want at run time. In addition to the valueDialog() it would be
  very nice to have a version that presents the user with a list of
  options from which they can select, rather than asking them to type
  a string. The messageBox() is nice but it will only allow up to
  three options (if I read the documentation correctly). If you pass
  this new selectDialog() a simple array then both the labels
  presented and the values sent back to the script would be the array
  values. If an associative array is passed, the keys could become
  the values passed and the array values the labels. The language
  selection box from the Scribus installer is a perfect excmple of
  what I'm looking for here.

* I'm getting an error when I try to run a script from the menu. When
  I navigate to the file and select it, I get an error that the file
  cannot be found.

  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<string>", line 8, in <module>
  IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\temp\Calendar.py'

  If I then edit prefs135.xml and change the back slashes in that
  path to forward slashes, I can select the file from the list of
  recently run scripts and it runs fine.

* To be sure that none of these items (and particularly the last one)
  have been fixed/addressed in a more recent snapshot, I just
  downloaded and installed 1.3.5svn from 10 October 2008. The problem
  is that now I can't figure out how to run a script at all. I assume
  (and desperately hope) that this is a temporary situation. Someone
  please tell me the scripter isn't going away. Or if I'm simply
  looking right at it but not seeing it, tell me where it went.

Thanks for your time. I'm perfectly willing to add any of these to the bug tracking system if anyone things it would be helpful.

--
Henry Hartley