What do you find difficult on a Dreamhack?

[sophie]

Hi all!

As the maintainer of the Dreamhacks service, I'm curious about how everybody's getting on with it and whether there's anything people would really like to have to make dev work easier.

For example, one thing I'm going to be working on is a way to make it easier to set up, start and stop the various auxiliary services that Dreamwidth uses, such as memcached, Gearman, and TheSchwartz. I'm hoping that this'll make it easier to work on bugs that need these services.

But I'd also really like to hear from people about the things they find most difficult when working on a Dreamhack. This can be anything - maybe our wiki's confusing or not quite up-to-date, or maybe you can't figure out the command you need to type to do something.

I want to make things as accessible as I can to everybody, new and experienced alike, so please let me know in the comments what you really wish was easier to do on a Dreamhack! I'll go through the comments later and see what I can do to help - for example, by programming a script for everybody to use on the server, editing the wiki, or simply answering a question if that's all that's needed!

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

Workers. I don't get how they work at all and it can make testing hard or impossible when trying to fix bugs related to emails and PMs for example whereas these are generally small, easy bugs.

[ninetydegrees]

Also, more about what you can do with Admin Tools, and as I was reminded today /admin/eventoutput in particular as I can't ever get it to work, and /dev/classes.

[sophie]

I don't blame you for finding /admin/eventoutput difficult. The page says that the argument fields are optional, but in reality it depends on the event type. When the page says the fields are optional, what it *means* is that the page itself won't check to make sure you've entered anything in those fields before going through the event code. (Because some events don't take any arguments, some only take one, etc.)

Right now, the only way to tell what the arguments are, as far as I know, is to look at the code itself. I'll see if I can get some sort of wiki page up for that too, although as with any documentation that sort of thing can get out of date. (I actually have a bug assigned to me that will result in changing the arguments for one event in particular, so yeah.)

I'll take a think and see what can be done.

[edit: Just realised I never explained about /dev/classes. That's a page which is intended as a place to test changes to site skin CSS files. (It's not relevant for people making journal styles, I believe.) If you're making a new site skin, you can use that page to test how each element (tables, text boxes, error messages, etc) would look in the skin. The actual classes used for the elements can be found by looking at the HTML source.]

[ninetydegrees]

Oooh! That explains a lot! Thank you! I would love a Wiki page on this.

I knew what /dev/classes was about actually and I should have said so, my apologies, but there's no easy way to access it if you don't remember the URL and I don't think it's referenced anywhere. I could be wrong about that as I regularly get lost on the Wiki... :)

[afuna]

Opened Bug 4198, because that's been bugging me too!

Bug 4199 as well :)

[sophie]

Workers are difficult, yeah. I actually got confused by how they work not long ago too, so I'll definitely try to make things a bit easier there. I'll try to do a wiki page first.

[edit: Looks like there's already a wiki page that might answer some of the questions you may have: http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Workers . Let me know if this helps!]

[ninetydegrees]

I knew of this page but it didn't really help. I can put some workers in workers.conf then run them with $LJHOME/bin/worker-manager --debug and some things works but others don't, like sending community invites or PMs, and I don't know why. I know I'm doing something wrong. I just don't know what it is.

[fu]

Hmmm, now I'm wondering if we could structure the example workers.conf to provide different use cases.

Like, everything you need for imports to run in one group, everything you need for notification emails to run in another, everythingf or exports...

would that help?

[sophie]

Personally, I think that would be awesome. In fact, we should talk; it would be an awesome thing for the Dreamhack script I'm working on to be able to toggle groups on and off, and if we do this in a consistent manner we should be able to do this pretty well!

[fu]

I didn't think of taking it that far, that's a great idea! Yes let's talk about this ;-)

[chagrined]

Well, down at the ultra-beginner level, I found/still find generating a patch confusing. There seemed to be two different ways of doing this and on the wiki sometimes it's explained using one way, and sometimes a different way. Denise explained a way to do it using the workflow I had been using (making edits in the live directory) but I still found it pretty confusing. IDK. So I haven't really gotten up to working with anything more complicated than that. (But also I haven't done anything with my Dreamhack for a while now as I haven't had time/energy/etc..)

[sophie]

I've been meaning to make a post about this for some time, actually. I need to dig out what I've written so far and finish it!

I unfortunately don't think I could do it justice with a quick explanation of the differences in this comment, but most people I know are using the "edit in the live directory" route, which I can explain, if you'd like me to do so! It's probably the easiest route to understand, although it does have its downsides.

[simargl]

I got a dreamhack but I literally have no idea what to do with it. I have no idea where I'm supposed to start.

[sophie]

Have you seen the Dreamhack Getting Started and Newbie Guide for Windows People Working on Minor Bugs pages on the wiki? Those have some very good background information. The latter page has a lot of useful information that might help to get you started. (In fact, thinking about it, I might add that to the welcome email.)

If those don't help, let me know and I'll do what I can to help you out!