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.

[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..)

[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.