thoughts, notes and mooo...
I didn't finish my report on the Neanderthal sprint. Let's see if I can wrap it up now:
On Thursday and Friday Luciano and I continued on pinning down versions for the dependencies of Grok. Thursday existed mostly of testing and trying to get as much "properly" released packaged included in the list as possible. Even if this meant we had to downgrade some of these.
One of the more restrictive criteria was to maintain compatibility with the Windows platform. Some of the eggs contain platform specific dependencies but these binaries are not always up-to-date with the most recent source releases.
At the end of Thursday we had a more or less working versions list and ideas on how to make buildout use an "official" versions.cfg file, that is published as part of a Grok release.
The solutions are described here: http://grok.zope.org/releaseinfo/readme.html
Friday consisted mostly of writing that report. But of course we had to properly wrap up the sprint as well. We gathered the groups of people that were still there (some had to leave on Wednesday and Thursday already) and reviewed the checkins that were done, had a first look at the new Grok website, and made a list of post sprint follow ups.
Last week I got postive feedback on the changes on grokproject and merged the changes to the trunk. Martijn and I got Grok-0.10.1 released and pushed grokproject-0.6 out the door as well..!
And by now, Grok turned 1 year old! And we're heading for a 1.0 release...
other people about the Neanderthal-sprint: Martijn's blog entry , Luciano's photos , and two entries by Lennart Regebro. When I find more, I'll add them.
Yesterday we had a cultural break. Aroldo arranged a trip to Neanderthal, with the Neanderthal museum in particular. Neaderthal is one of the first places where remains of prehistoric mankind have been found.
The museum is very well made and very interesting. We were guided by a lady that had to cope with this group of geeks now that happily accepted her invitation to ask questions and discuss the things she explained :-)
When we retured at the hotel in the evening we decided to order pizza's, get some beers in and basically continue the sprint just there.
I meant to jot something down after the first day of sprinting, but I was basically too tired. I'm again tired but I felt I needed to write down something now, because else it wouldn't happen anymore.
The trip to Koln by motorcycle went just fine. It is less than 300km, so you should be able to do it about 3 hours. If you don't forget to take your own wallet with you and find out only when you're about to refuel that is...
At the hotel we - I happened to bump into Lennart when I arrived - quickly met up with Martijn and Jasper and Guido and Aroldo in some restaurant. Later that night Uli and Luciano arrived - it is great to be able to meet the people in real life that you only know from the mailinglist!
Monday morning started off with identifying sprint topics and tasks and to try and do some planning.
Besides lots of other stuff, Luciano and I expressed interest to continue to work on the Grok reference documentation, because it is severly lacking. Together with Jasper, Guido and Uli we decided to continue Uli's work and to use the RestructuredText version of the original LaTex source files that Theuni started a while ago and on which I tried to work as well.
Jasper and Uli wrote some code and gathered pieces of the puzzle to render nice HTML from the ReST files, esp. in regard to the specific tags and directives that we use. We are looking at the current Python (2.5) documentation there too, because that documentation effort has apparently switched to ReST as well.
Luciano and I concentrated more on the content-level of the reference documentation: we decided on the structure of the documents, cleaned up whatever content that was already there and continued writing new sections. One of the interesting conclusions was, that, although for in Grok itself the theme of ICavemen, ICaves, IFireplaces and IClubs for writing test classes and interfaces and so on is nice and cute, for the reference documentation it might be worthwhile to come up with more realistic and pragmatic examples of how to use the code. That way we think to give better examples of how to solve actual use cases.
Today (well, actually, yesterday by now) we knew we would continue on the reference documentation, but wanted to some coding as well. First we finally concluded the seemingly simple task of making Grok skip tests and ftests modules and packages in Grok-based application when Zope is started.
If these packages are not skipped, the registrations done in the test code (for testing the application) show up in the running Zope which is usually not what you want. I had a Martian branch (where this skipping is actually done) sitting there that needed a merge and Uli did some work too on this. We reviewed Uli's work and my branch, improved it here and there, released martian-0.9 and then updated Grok to make use of the skipping-modules-during-the-scan-process- API.
Then we headed for another important task: try to see if we could come up with a list of versions of dependencies of Grok that are known to work. Currently we find ourselves in a quite messy situation, where the toolset we use to make predictable and reproducible buildouts of our code bases and its dependencies does not deliver and appears to make life more difficult instead of easier. I think most of this is not so much due to the tools, but due to the learning process the people doing releases of the software we depend on (and remember, where would we be without these people and the things they have built!!) are going through. But looking at the Zope3-dev list, I think I can see clear signs that this is another complex situation the community is sorting out.
But more on that later, now I really need to go to sleep, because tomorrow we will go to Neanderthal and maybe even "meet" the great-great-great-grandfather of Grok...
