Maybe YARG is not the best Rsync GUI out there, maybe it has flaws, bugs or it's not easy to use. BUT! It demonstrates some technologies which may come in handy in some cases. These are:

• PyQT5,
• distutils installation with resource files.

You can install the required dependencies with the following commands on Ubuntu 14.04:

apt-get install qtdeclarative5-quicklayouts-plugin qtdeclarative5-controls-plugin python3 python3-pyqt5 python3-pyqt5.qtquick python3-setuptools
easy_install3 PyYAML

Clone the source code into a directory:

git clone https://github.com/ihrwein/yarg.git

Then, you can install YARG:

python3 setup.py install

You have to copy a configuration file into your HOME directory (from the clones git repo):

cp tests/yarg.conf ~/.yarg.conf

Now, you are ready to use YARG:

$ yarg

I struggled with our setup.py until I found a way to accomplish my goal: I wanted to use resource files (*.qml) in this project and reference them with their relative path to the project's root directory in my runner script.

You can check the layout of this project:

• all python files are under yarg/ package
• all QML files are under yarg/resource/
• a main program is a script called runner.py (in the repo's root dir), which references a QML with path: yarg/resource/main.qml

The problem is, that when I install this little program, the runner script ends up in a bin directory somewhere on my computer. It will import the yarg package, but it won't find the *.qml files. I worked around this with the following solution:

• in setup.py, I use data_files to tell distutils, what are my resource files:

...
data_files=[('resource', ['yarg/resource/main.qml'])],
...

• in my runner script, I use the pkg_resources module, to access to the resource files bundled in a single EGG file, which is a simple compressed file with a specific directory and file layout and some meta files. When you use pkg_resouces, it will decompress your resources in a temporary directory and tells you the location of this place:

import pkg_resources
...
# This will decompress the whole yarg/resource directory into a temp. dir. and returns
# the path of that dir.
# I need this, because my root QML file (main.qml) imports the others next to it.
pkg_resources.resource_filename('yarg', 'resource')
...
# This function returns the path of the yarg/resource/main.qml files.
pkg_resources.resource_filename('yarg.resource', 'main.qml')

And now, I'm able to use the same code in development and after installation. pkg_resources will find the most appropriate locations.