dw_dev | A little organization and updates!

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meetings

A little organization and updates!

Hi all!

I've been doing some poking around and realized that I don't have a good overall state-of-the-DW-development. I have some vague ideas about what some people are working on and interested in, but I wanted to make those vague ideas become a bit less vague. :)

If you have a few minutes, I'd appreciate you taking the time to answer a couple of quick questions here!

Are you actively working on a bug (or several) right now? Which ones?
What are you interested in working on -- broadly or narrowly, what do you want to do? (Or are you just open for suggestions?)
Is there anything explicitly blocking you from doing what you want? (Knowledge, someone has the bug claimed for a year, need a hand with something, etc.)
Free form! Anything you want to say or ask. :)

I also want us to have another development focused chat like we did some months ago. I think the last one I did was well timed for US developers but bad for EU, so I'll go the other way this time. I'm thinking something like 8AM Pacific which is midnight for fu and 4PM UTC on a Sunday. Reasonable?

Thanks!

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Hi -- welcome to Dreamwidth development! Pleased to meet you. :)

Denise has given lots of good advice and some suggestions about picking a bug, so I won't dabble too much on that. I will say that you're always welcome to ping us and ask for advice on a bug, or for suggestions. We're happy to point you in the right direction or talk your ear off about implementing things!

Perl and JS are very different languages with different focuses. If you want to do frontend development, JS will serve you better. For backend stuff, Perl. Since you know HTML and CSS, frontend might be a better match -- but it all depends on where you want to go with your skills. It's always good to have a variety and learn lots of things!

The way forward, generally:

1. Have your hack environment setup (sounds like you do)
2. Find a bug that is interesting and someone says is easy (there's a list below!)
3. Figure out where in the code this bug sits (you can search with 'grep' or you can look through files or you can ask) -- this is sometimes the hardest part, don't be afraid to ask for help!
4. Make a change to fix it
5. Test your change on your hack environment
6. If the bug is fixed, submit a pull request
7. Wait for a review!

The last step ... I believe we have the documentation on the wiki. Afuna/Denise, do you have a link handy?

Totally ask for help, though! Then help make sure the documentation is good. If something is lacking, edit it and submit some clarifications. It is very much appreciated and another great way of getting familiar with the process.

Whew -- there, I've rambled at you. Welcome again. :)

An app would be fantastic! I know that many people want one -- myself included, although I use iOS right now. We're always here for help with the API and design and ideas and such, although we don't have a lot of client-side experience around.

When you get started on things, you should post and tell us what you need! We'll see what we can do. :)

Bug 3117 is pretty funny -- I wonder how that got in there! I'd be interested in seeing the fix when you get it sorted.

Exporting is definitely a big project. I don't know how much detail we have on any bugs that are open for it, but I definitely recommend making it something that runs external to the core service. I.e., build it using the APIs and use that as a tug to make the APIs better if they're deficient.

(I'm assuming that with a skill level capable of handling journal exports, you can handle some API stuff! And hey, we're here to help if you get stuck or need a hand with that!)

I totally agree about IRC. I'm there all of the time, but for the life of me I can't chat. Maybe at my best I can spend a few minutes doing some small-talk, but I always end up wandering off and getting sidetracked into other things. I feel bad about it, heh.

Thanks for taking the time to comment and to work on Dreamwidth! :)

Hah, yes; you do seem to enjoy taking the large things and making them Happen. That's fantastic, though, and I'm really glad to have folks like you around who can take on a big project and get it done. :)

Would Saturdays be better? I don't want to conflict with family day/church/etc and my reason for avoiding Saturdays (I have plans) is just a conflict every other Saturday so I can schedule around them.

Thanks for the heads up! I forgot DST was this weekend. That's actually ... important ... as I have early Monday morning plans that involve coordinating with Europe (CET). Narrowly dodged a bullet there...

I'm thinking Saturdays would be better given Sundays seem to be church/family day/etc. I don't know, maybe there's no winning. I'll just have to schedule something and see how it goes...

Perhaps the best plan is to schedule it far enough out that there is plenty of time for people to plan to attend?

Avoiding burnout: a skill not many people have, myself included. Congrats on figuring out that particular trick!

It makes sense re: having some limits so that this can remain a hobby. It works out pretty well for DW though since you're good at working with the styles system, which not many people have the patience/expertise for.

I'll see what we can get put together re: the workers. I thought we had something, but apparently not! They're not super difficult to run, the problem is mostly just knowing which ones to do. Do you know if you've set up TheSchwartz or not? (Or if hack sets it up by default? I am not sure.)

My family and I are great! Oliver is cruising around with reckless abandon and starting to chatter -- not words, but just excited baby-talk -- it's really quite adorable. Henry is a handful, but he's three and I'm told that's supposed to happen; and to be fair, he's quite wonderful, it's just easy to mention the tantrums. This morning we were all sitting down and eating breakfast and Henry looked up from his cheerios and said "We're a family!" and I got tears in my eyes. It was just awesome.

I, on the other hand, am busy and crazy and don't stop moving until I pass out. Day job, Dreamwidth, family, flight lessons, 2 LARPs, 2 sit-down RPGs, ... I have packed myself to bursting. I'm actually shuffling some of these off to the "minimum attention" pile and debating flat-out cutting some and, for sure, some are temporary. I keep myself busy and yet that seems to be how I run best. High octane -- go go go.

Thanks for answering my questions! I'll definitely post up about the dev meeting chat but it will be an advanced notice; there will be plenty of notice!

You're also keeping an eye on the servers and fixing the myriad bone-headed mistakes I seem to have made recently. I'd like to claim that I'm just trying to keep you on your toes, but that would just be to try to salvage a small part of my ego... ;)

Thanks again for all of your hard work on the infrastructure. I don't know how we'd survive without your help. (Without me going crazy.)

I hope you get stuff set up and get some time -- always good to have more people hacking on DW. :)

The bare-VM-to-DW is getting a bit easier since I did the extlib work. This lets you use cpanm to install the Perl packages you need to a local directory. You may even be able to run DW completely out of a user's directory now. The only piece I haven't messed with is the Apache; you could make a build script and then set up the configs locally and everything else should run.

Oh, and MySQL. You'd either need a system database or run a locally installed MySQL under the user's account. Of course I'm not sure if you want to set something up to install in a user's directory on a shared VM, or if you want a "configure the whole VM" kind of thing. Either way would be an interesting project.

Yessssssssss -- time is hard. Well, whatever you get for DW is awesome, and whatever you don't we will be jealous of! ;)

That's a good quote, although it's difficult not to look at old code and go "I SHOULD REWRITE IT". At least, it's a difficult problem for me, I really enjoy going back and fixing old code of mine...

Fu and 90D went and filled my inbox with style review comments, so we're a fair bit more caught up on that one now!

The 'Custom Text as userprop' and 'Have a No Icon option even when default is set' are the two I started and then ended up hitting a wall with. The custom text one is... partway there. I have a widget! It renders! It grabs the S2 layer text if no custom text is saved! But it doesn't save to the userprops for some reason.

The no-icon one has just been me banging my head against a wall repeatedly, basically.

As one of the Styles People, I'm going to heartily second theme-patching. We have a little scripty thing to help with it, which I need to update, and which was actually my intro to Perl coding *g* (

rb wrote the base, and then I added to it, and then Fu helped me iron out bugs, but it's not perfect yet). We have a lot of new themes that need patching, and not a lot of people to do it, because... well, okay, it's a little boring, and I think the only people other than me who know how to do it are either doing bigger bugs, or busy with life.

do you mean the dev getting started?

Bug 3117 is pretty funny -- I wonder how that got in there!

My guess, though I've not tracked it down, is that there is an existence check on the keyword somewhere and perl evaluates it to 0/false because of the leading 0 in the string.

IIRC, last time I looked at the export bugs there were a couple, including general improvement of the existing export tool, and a specific request to export as pdf. My thought was to find my way around the API (*sigh* document where necessary), and that ideally dreamwidth probably only wants to support exporting to a single format (XML) - at least for basic accounts. But if the XML were well enough documented then third parties (or dreamwidth could provide the source code but not host the application) could easily write conversion tools to act on the XML. I'll need to get the hang of the queuing system as well - so lots of learning involved.

i support this plan and will cheer you along the whole way :)

Re workers: Have you looked at http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/wiki/index.php/Dreamhack_getting_started#A_note_about_TheSchwartz ? (I'm not sure whether you're referring to using the existing workers or writing a new one. If the latter, see http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/wiki/index.php/TheSchwartz instead.)

If you have and they don't answer your question, or if there's room for improvement, you can either ask in the latest questions thread, file a Docs/Wiki bug or both.

I have and I meant using existing ones. I've also read http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/wiki/index.php/Workers but none of that told me how to make emails or PMs or search or latest things or the shop work. I know people have asked about them in the past - I think zvi did - and nobody was able to explain it to them either.

It's a trick I had to learn very early for my job so

I think it's set up. I have all the data in config-private and the lines are uncommented. I've used $LJHOME/bin/worker-manager --debug and edited workers.conf and I can see it runs some stuff but I still can't get some emails (I've also used /admin/eventoutput whenever I could but it's hard to figure it out sometimes) or PMs or latest things. Don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Awww. How wonderful! I think it's hard to remember how intense things feel when you're so young and how intensely even if briefly you react in return because that's all you know. Is he going to kindergarten yet? (sorry if that's an odd question; I don't know how it works in your country :)

XD I imagined you flying the plane then jumping out of the plane then running to your job while taking your gear off. Go go go! Sorry for my silly ramblings. Seriously, though, we definitely need an official Captain Mark icon.

Hmm. This sounds to me like it requires troubleshooting more than instructions. (The instructions may be incomplete or wrong in a way that's contributing to your problem, but it's hard to know for sure whether and how without figuring out why it doesn't work.)

I think the only one which seemed to work for me was expunge-users. I've always thought I was supposed to add parameters that I didn't know about.

Perhaps the best plan is to schedule it far enough out that there is plenty of time for people to plan to attend?

Probably?

We have this one!

*points to icon* *tries to stop laughing*

Late to the party here due to the new-house-no-internets dance, but:

1. My focus for a little while has been adding the ability for DW to tweet notifications of new entries. This is with Fu for review in a draft form at the moment, and I'm glad to say that its blocking bugs have been fixed :-)

Once it's in it should be fairly straightforward to add other sites that use OAuth (only Tumblr springs to mind, but there are probably others) and I may well take that on. However, a IMHO blocker for wider other-sites support is a redesign of the Other Sites settings page - I've bodged Twitter in, but with any more sites it would get very unwieldy. This probably needs input from somebody with considerably more front-end ability than me. There is an existing bug for this, but I forget the number ;-)

2. While the twitter thing is (by my standards) a fairly significant feature, my general comfort zone is to swat the little bugs to leave the more capable people free to look at bigger things :-) To this end, I'm always open to suggestions of little things that would be really helpful to have fixed. In the past I've picked up things that have caused a number of support tickets.

3. See above re Other Sites settings UI.

4.
a) My input will decrease significantly from about a fortnight ago, due to starting a phd. However, once I'm up and running on that I hope to not be totally absent. (I am totally absent now owing to having no connectivity in my new house).
b) As I discussed with fu on IRC a little while ago, I think it would be nice to have occasional posts from you guys outlining the big picture of where you see development going - what are the priorities at present, what's happening, and so forth. Things sometimes seem a little opaque. (this is intended as a suggestion rather than as a complaint!)
c) There was something else I was going to say, but I have completely forgotten what it was.

4pm on a Sunday sounds good for me. As much notice as possible would be helpful!

Since I got around to looking them up,
The bug to add Twitter support is 4504. The one for a new Other Sites UI is 3590.

#1. Are you actively working on a bug (or several) right now? Which ones?

Okay here are my main things right now:

* Converting BML to TT. I'm getting better at it as I go. My current branch is converting the advanced customization area to TT, and it's almost done. I have also been converting pieces of the admin area to TT. To help others who will need to make TT pages, I have started a instructional cookbook.

* Making a jquery mobile version of the site. Have been blocked by all of the comment loading logic residing in S2 and not wanting to duplicate it, but have gotten good advice from

mark (YOOOOU) on abstracting that logic out into DW::Logic. I'm going to work on that part next.

* Trying to get the dreamhack system back up and running with our new git setup. This is a subject where I am very over my head but Sophie has a great set up, so hopefully I can just work from there and get it to a place where we can make new dreamhacks for people.

chebe's not working when she was ready and rarin' to go was a big wake up call for me. So far, a new dreamhack repository has been set up, I have a pull request for what I think are the source control files (aka not the checkout of DW code or automatically generated coverage/doc/test output.) I've made an issue to create a development branch on the main dreamwidth repo for it, since that's seemed to work out really great for dw-free; then I can do my development on a git branch. I've checked out a server to work with on DigitalOcean and I'm trying to set up a system there so I can test out the system--I'll note that this seems like a good opportunity to upgrade the OS of the dreamhack server, so I'm using 12.04 as a base. Once I have something that works, we'll need to figure out upgrading the dreamhack system to it.

#2. What are you interested in working on -- broadly or narrowly, what do you want to do? (Or are you just open for suggestions?)

I have broad ranging interests, the abilities to learn what I need to know for them, and my main barrier is time and focus energy.

I want to get rid of BML, I want to have a mobile version of the site. I also have some fantasies
in my head for something I call "cloaking" based on this bug where both entries and comments to a community could be made anonymously, with the backend keeping track. That way, admins could run anonymous communities while still maintaining some degree of of commenting accountability--if membership is moderated, entries/comments are members only, and they can ban an anoymous commentor from commenting without knowing who it is they have banned, then I think there could be a space where anonymous communities could run with more accountability. So, there would be cloaked posts and cloaked comments.

#3. Is there anything explicitly blocking you from doing what you want? (Knowledge, someone has the bug claimed for a year, need a hand with something, etc.)

I will most definitely need help with dreamhack stuff, and people can expect liberal

dw_dev posts from me as I try to get it working. I might end up needing review/advice when I work on moving comment display logic from S2 to a DW::Logic place; I know efficiency is extremely important for this code and don't want to end up putting us in a bad position.

#4. Free form! Anything you want to say or ask. :)

HI MARK HI i can totally do some Sunday meeting if I know about it in advance enough to make plans EVEN IF IT IS AT 8AM

also re: #2 sometimes I have fantasies of learning how to do snazzier front end stuff and redoing site sections to modernize them

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A little organization and updates!

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I finally finished my questionaaaaaire

Re: I finally finished my questionaaaaaire