[Twisted-Python] Twisted Sprint Report (2013-09-23)

Richard Wall m-lists at the-moon.net
Tue Sep 24 14:39:15 MDT 2013


On 24 September 2013 14:07,  <exarkun at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
<snip>
> Woo.  Hope you guys had fun.  Thanks for the report, Richard.

Yep, it was a good day.

There were a few things that could have gone better. Here are a few thoughts.

* Easy Tickets
In hindsight, I should have prepared a selection of suitable tickets.

The "easy" tickets search is useful, but many of them have been worked
on already and it's difficult to choose which of these are suitable
for sprint contributors without reading through the history.
One of the tickets I chose had already been mostly completed and the
remaining work (filling in missing docstrings for mail avatar tests)
was impossible for me to explain, let alone for the new contributors.

The "documentation" ticket report is also useful, but with our current
version of trac, there's no way of dynamically creating a report which
looks for "easy" AND "documentation" keywords.
New versions of trac allow this I think. Meanwhile we could write a
custom SQL report for this. And again it requires a little preparation
to select tickets which haven't got complications.

* Windows Development
Two of the guys were running windows and I struggled to help them set
up a working development environment. This evening I found this page
by cyli which might have helped, but probably needs updating.
 * https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TwistedDevelopment#Win32development

* Working in pairs
Anyway, we soon gave up on Windows and they paired up with the others
who were running Linux, and that worked well.

* Dev Requirements
It would be nice to have a dev-requirements.txt file so that they
could easily install the necessary development tools. pydoctor,
coverage, nevow, zope.interface, twistedchecker, etc
See:
 * https://github.com/hynek/structlog/blob/master/dev-requirements.txt

* Nevow
One of the guys was trying to run the documentation tools and we all
got thoroughly confused by the many broken links to Nevow.

The official link is
https://launchpad.net/divmod.org
...but it doesn't include a link to documentation.

There are these unofficial links and yet these are linked to from the
Twisted docs.
https://launchpad.net/divmod
https://launchpad.net/nevow

The pypi package is well out of date and has a broken project link
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Nevow/0.10.0

The documentation has a broken download link.
http://divmod.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

It's such a shame that Nevow got into this state and that it isn't
easier to install.
It's fantastic software - especially Athena. And I was always partial
to Formless too.
There was even a lightening talk from a guy touting his *new* pythonic
system for generating HTML ie STAN!

* Combinator (or alternatives)
I've always used combinator to switch between Twisted branches, but it
would nice to have some documentation of non-combinator development
methods...what tools do people use to update their paths when they
switch between branches? I suppose with git you don't have to.
Is it worth considering putting combinator on Pypi?

* Git
Some of them struggled to get a complete subversion checkout (due to
dodgy conference wifi I think)  and tried to use git instead. It would
have been helpful if I'd re-read the latest Twisted git documentation
in preparation. It explains how to create a diff containing just the
local changes to a checked out branch.
 * https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/GitMirror

* The Django Sprint
By contrast, the neighbouring  Django sprint was much better prepared.
They'd run a series of tutorial sessions earlier in the conference, on
how to contribute to Django. So their sprinters hit the ground
running.
 * https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-developers/7JFKNoYl2EU
 * http://dont-be-afraid-to-commit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
It's a good idea but a lot more work I guess.


Anyway, next time I'll know  and maybe it'll be a little easier.

-RichardW.




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