Berlin 2016 sprint update

This week some Plonistas, unfortunately fewer than expected, meet at IN-Berlin to work towards a brighter future for Plone.

Some of us resumed our work already started in Innsbruck sprint early this year while some other topics grew out of discussions and trying things out.

I will never get to write as good as Paul reporting on Barcelona’s sprint, but hey, I will do my best:

In no special order:

Just by trying out the newly shiny plone.org website (congrats plone.org team!!), some bugs where discovered and reported, work done by Stephan Klinger.

The PLIP about assimilating collective.indexing to Plone core finally got all its tests green and is about to be ready for review, work done by Maik Derstappen and Gil Forcada.

Python 3 support was a hot topic during the sprint, so with that in mind Florian Pilz and Michael Howitz created a new tool, zodb.py3migrate, that allows you to convert existing ZODB databases to python 3! Best of all, its great documentation! Be aware that the migration is done in place!

Our Jens² team was not quadratic this time around, but Jens Vagelpohl continued trying to tame Pluggable Authentication Service (aka PAS).

Did I say that Python 3 was a hot topic? Thomas Lotze with googling support from Gil Forcada took the problem head on and decided that, as Thomas had not that much time (unfortunately he was around only 3 days), work on cracking hard nuts: C extensions. And indeed he did! AccessControl and DocumentTemplate at least compile on python 3.5 (throwing quite some warnings, but hey, have you ever seen Archetypes being installed?). Best of all is that Python 2.6 and 2.7 already have quite some macros for forward compatibility, so the bits that are compatible were pull requested and they are already merged!

Unfortunately that work, C extensions, came to a halt as we hit with RestrictedPython. After long discussions between Thomas, Gil and Maik we decided to make a video conference with the Barcelona sprint, Eric Bréhault, as well as Alexander Loechel, who couldn’t join is in Berlin, but that he already had worked on the topic while in Insbruck early this year (read about his findings). The discussion went really well and Alexander offered himself to continue working on it, stay tuned!

Maik and Stephan meanwhile where not happy with the constellation of form packages that we currently have (z3c.form, plone.autoform, plone.supermodel, plone.z3cform, plone.app.z3cform…) and made yet another package ((will be soon moved to collective))… just kidding! No, instead they worked on improving the forms related documentation: getting rid of grok ((and hidden grok dependencies lying in plone.directives.form and plone.directives.dexterity)) and making sure that the documentation is consistent ((at the beginning there are some fields, and two pages later, magically, fields are different!)). For that Stephan created the linked above package and Maik was working on moving the remaining useful bits of plone.directives.form to plone.autoform. Stephan started a discussion on the topic on community.plone.org.

Lastly, I put my jenkins/mr.roboto hat on and added some more functionality to mr.roboto: warn which pull request jenkins jobs need to ran to know if a pull request can be safely merged and auto update buildout.coredev’s checkouts.cfg whenever a pull request gets merged. The logic is fairly trivial, but gathering all the pieces together to drive the control is far from it, and testing is yet a complete other matter (thanks mock!!).

All in all we had fun, lots of things got done or discussed and, as with every sprint, everyone is looking for the next one!

Happy hacking!

Ready, set, sprint!

In less than a week Plonistas will be meeting in Berlin to sprint on Plone.

The topic this time is to continue the long endeavor to cleanup and slim down our stack, Zope included.

Thanks to IN-Berlin we will sprint at their offices. All information on how to get there is on the sprint page.

The main communication channels with the sprints will be the usual #sprint IRC channel (on freenode) and we will try to maintain a hangout channel open as well (we will provide the link later on).

On social networks you can try to keep an eye on #berlinsprint hashtag.

Happy hacking!

Berlin strategic sprint 2016 update

In nearly a month the Berlin strategic sprint 2016 will start, and finally we can announce where it will be hosted: IN-Berlin offices!

You can find all information in the link above.

There are still some spots left, the venue is big enough to accommodate around 15 to 20 persons, so if you want to join the sprint, now is the time to sign up and register. As it’s an strategic sprint the Plone Foundation could help with the travel costs if that’s an issue for you to attend, contact them!

And best of all: spring has already arrived in Berlin, so we can expect good weather ((hopefully not famous last words)) and a full city to enjoy!

See you all in Berlin!

Towards more maintainable code

On my talk at the Plone Conference 2015 (slides, talk notes from Maurits) one of my points was that a written style guide is worth nothing if you can not check/enforce it.

Who cares what a style guide says regarding indentation, dependencies, string quoting, docstrings, handling i18n, etc etc if then one can freely commit changes that go against the said style guide?

Fortunately in Python we already have pep8 (the tool) and flake8 (with its great plugin ecosystem). To top it off, on Plone we already have plone.recipie.codeanalysis. We have the tools.

Talk is cheap

I’ve been putting as much effort and free time as I could to make that happen.

plone.recipe.codeanalysis has been improved ((and by no means only by me)), flake8 plugins have been written, and finally during this last Alpine City Strategic Sprint 2016 I could implement the missing piece: report back to the users (see an example)!

The script is fairly simple:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plone/buildout.coredev/5.0/bootstrap.py -O bootstrap.py
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plone/buildout.coredev/5.0/experimental/qa.cfg -O qa.cfg
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plone/plone.recipe.codeanalysis/master/.isort.cfg -O .isort.cfg
python bootstrap.py -c qa.cfg
bin/buildout -c qa.cfg
bin/code-analysis

Run the above on any Plone distribution and see the output collected on parts/code-analysis/flake8.log

Currently only a few packages are checked, but cleanup tasks can start on any Plone package as of now. Be sure to ask for a job that will check that the package remains clean as soon as your cleanup changes are merged!

Keep on!

Alpine City Strategic Sprint 2016 – personal report

This past five days I had the pleasure the be part on the last Plone sprint: Alpine City Strategic Sprint 2016, what a blast!

In the following days, the amazing never running out of steam, Jens will report back to the community. A partial/preview report already exists for the impatient ones (disclaimer: I made it, so there’s probably quite a few things missing).

Below I will make a summary of what I achieved thanks to being part of the sprint.

Work done

Jenkins/CI

bring back node4 on Jenkins: meaning that we can run more jobs at the same time, really handy for a sprint or at release time/high activity!
quickly update (totally untested, so dragons ahead) ZODB, Zope, ZTK and CMF jenkins jobs, now they are bundled together in a tab. Pointers on how to make them reliable/improve them highly appreciated, submit tickets for it so we can keep track of them
create jenkins jobs for PLIPs being worked on during the sprint. In retrospect they took me less than 5 minutes of work ((thanks to jenkins-job-builder)) and they proved to be extremely helpful. Pro tip: whenever working on a new PLIP ask for a jenkins job!
create more jenkins jobs for checking, and reporting back, code analysis on distributions (more about it on a follow-up post)

collective.indexing

Fortunately all the above took less than one or two hours, my main task during the sprint was, together with Maik, bring collective.indexing in Plone core without having to add yet another package ((which our release manager will probably welcome for a change)). Please read the PLIP description, linked above, to know the scope of it.

As of now we are down to one single test failure! We are highly appreciated on creative ways to solve that last one…

Not only work

A sprint is way more than just sitting in front of a laptop and coding!

Lots of interesting discussions where held, we had lots of fun, we did some sightseeing and enjoyed being together.

And after that I can only say that Plone’s future is brighter than ever has been!

As a personal pet peeve, we finally agreed (?) on how to sort imports! :-)

Last words go to Jens and Christine for taking so much care on preparing everything and being so open and helpful at any time, thanks!