pycon 2008 – day 3
Posted on March 16, 2008
Filed Under python | 2 Comments
the first keynote address was really good, calling for an easier way of getting a standardized python distribution on windows to make it easier to distribute single python scripts. the second keynote address, snake charming the dragon, was also good but dragged on a little too long with perhaps too much detail. mark hammond discussed pyxpcom and the lack of community support as well as the direction of the mozilla project. the olpc talk was excellent. despite ivan losing his original presentation and having to rewrite it during the first two on someone else’s computer, it was an excellent overview of where the olpc project is and some of its early successes in the field.
next i went to the consuming html talk by ian bicking. he started with presenting a case why you might want to consume html instead of either xml or xhtml and continued by discussing various python libraries for parsing and working with html. i didn’t realize that the lxml parser was a suitable alternative to BeautifulSoup and will certainly give it a closer look. there was a mini-argument about the merits of xhtml following ian’s assertion that xhtml will never be widely accepted, including annoying interjections during the talk. otherwise it was a pretty good talk but the level of detail was a bit lower than i had expected.
the wingware presentation was interesting. i’ve never been much of an IDE user – i’ve tried using slickedit and others but i keep falling back to trusty vim. i don’t expect to start using either wing or komodo – the nature of my company’s product makes it difficult to develop solely on one’s laptop and i haven’t been comfortable with remotely editing, given that i’ve typically had gateway hops between my workstation and the code i’m editing. its impressive that the wing ide and the supporting business is managed by two guys.
titus brown’s olpc testing techniques talk was very informative and unexpectedly critical of the testing techniques, or lack thereof, used by the olpc project, asserting that without testing the project will inevitably lead to a quality death spiral. he’s doing some cool stuff with code coverage, using python’s sys.settrace() function to record the execution path of olpc’s sugar interface, sending it to a web server where it can be immediately analyzed with provisions for clearing previous history and omitting uninteresting execution paths.
i sat in on the wing ide bof for a bit while eating lunch but it was mostly wrapping up with discussions about possible and future features by the time i got there.
the lightning talks today were much better. you can see the links i saved on my del.icio.us page. i was going to write more about each of them but i didn’t take any notes and don’t have a great memory.
following the lightning talks today was brett cannon’s humorous and well presented intro to sprinting, after which the sprint coaches introduced themselves and answered various questions about sprinting.
the superhuman duo from wingware described earlier were generous enough to provide free licenses of their premium product to all sprinters. i got my activation key without much delay and will download & try it out in the next few days.
after considering the rather large list of of sprints i settled on the bazaar sprint because it has the possibility of being most directly applicable to my day job and seems to have a low barrier to entry. also version control is something i’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about in the course of trying to implement release management for my employer.
there was a good turnout for the bazaar sprinting tutorial. the core bazaar developers from canonical really have their stuff together and provided a very thorough introduction of both how to use bazaar and how to contribute to bazaar, either by creating a plugin or changing the core project itself. again, the core bazaar team and its surrounding community really deserve some recognition for the outstanding quality of the source code and development process – everything from a complete test suite to a patch submission tracking page where each patch must be reviewed by two core developers before it is allowed to be merged into the central bazaar repository.
tomorrow is my last day here in chicago and i plan to spend it sprinting with the bazaar bunch.
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Exciting to hear about Bazaar … I’m always nervous about the process of actually migrating over all the source from one repository to the next, but the stuff the Bazaar guys are building in to help make the transition from svn sounds promising. (Plus I like the idea of a repository written entirely in python :-)
agreed. i’ve had some luck converting some personal svn repositories to bazaar and attempted to convert a copy of our repository on my laptop but ran into some odd problem and didn’t have much time to dig into it. i’ll take another stab at it next week.
i’m really excited about the merge handling, though. i think it’ll eliminate many of the headaches we have with svn when merging multiple times between branches.