Apps Meeting 29 June 2006

Agenda

• Question of the week: If our goal is to get people outside of OSAF using Chandler in Q1 2007 (Beta), what should we be doing more of/less of to focus on getting this done?

• 0.7alpha3
  • Bug count and schedule
    • Branching policy
  • Big features update
    • Dashboard and Scheduling (Bryan)
    • Toolbar (Reid)
    • Styles / CPIA (John)
    • wx (Robin)
    • i18n (Brian K and Markku)
    • NLP (Darshana)
• Chandler dev summary feedback

Notes

• Question of the week:
  • John: schema evolution, will help people try out changes more quickly. What features are missing from the beta.
  • Darshana: must be a lot faster
  • Markku: package deal for Chandler -- do we have all of the services using it -- needing more than one person using it -- try to convince university or some larger entity to try it out
  • Bryan: the way we communicate how we are different could be more clear -- how to come to an understanding of what we are doing -- easier once we are implemented, as we are on our way to that, can be hard to understand where we are on that road.
  • John: every successful product has had a 30 second quick demo to get their attention -- that catches the user's first attention -- we don't have a good story for that -- we build a repository right when you start -- what is the real story? maybe
  • Bryan: address problems people have trying to use it early
  • Is performance a problem that blocks people from using it? Could be much better?
  • Reid: make it faster, make it smaller, internally -- do more code review meetings, more eyes looking at more of the code
  • Robin: any chance of bundling with msft? make it attractive in some way, get people interested, get developers interested in making parcels -- if they get excited they are good evangelists
  • If the dashboard could really be demo'd in 30s, that could be really compelling
  • Bryan likes the "dash" in dashboard: Screencasts have roped his interest from other projects -- would be a good 30s demo -- would invest 15 minutes in something that is more than a page, more of a conversation
• Code reviews:
  • Code review Reid's recent button work
  • Performance sensitive, performance related code -- the way events are handled
  • Code reviews of code that hasn't been looked at a lot recently
  • Stamping 3000 event calendar bug -- lots of mechanism that eats up time -- what to do next with that? Geek talk w/performance analysis -- how to take a performance problem and solve it -- Alec felt like he had a good handle on it.
  • John: one thing that happens today, a bug in the table that deals with all of the items. It has a number,
  • Next action: elevate the priority of this bug (Katie)
  • Next action: schedule a performance analysis geek talk (Katie)
  • Next action: John to meet up with Reid and look at button work
• John has 3 bugs, some risk that one or two don't get fixed, they are mac bugs, stay at home with his mac might be the best
  • John has some other bugs that he's narrowed down that Bryan might be able to help fix. Large class of bugs related to sizers and layout. Next action: John to talk to Bryan about these bugs.
• Branch policy
  • John: branch costs are lower with svn, if anything we are branching too late, been able to work with branches
  • Bryan: likes working with branches as little as possible -- 10 bugs is about right. By branching we free up the trunk, rework conflicts at merge time and causes more work. Worries about leaving a bug in the trunk as it only gets fixed in the branch. Some extra overhead. Perhaps ask again in a post mortem.
• Big features:
  • Bryan: fixing a rash of bugs recently. Went through dashboard spec and sent out list of new questions (spec related and domain model questions). Wiki page with raw list of tasks that he plucked out of that spec. Now need to prioritize and figure out dependency, and can start swagging things. Haven't paid much attention to detail issues, don't know the prioritization of those issues. Assume dashboard is more important. Would like to get a handle with Grant on domain model work, as how complex this will be is a dependency. Really good indexing might make UI work easy and small.
  • Reid: checked in toolbar -- putting back to the way it was, rolling a new wx toolbar. Trying to run functional tests. Toolbar will be old toolbar in alpha3.
  • John: really nasty bugs on mac got fixed last week. Has been focused on bugs. Timing related test failures have been difficult. Getting better and better at debugging wx -- this has really helped. Robin's work has really helped. Builds are getting zippy -- good step forward.
  • Robin: alpha3 bugs are gone, have been making himself available for other people and helping. Sent a patch to Grant about the menus. John: there might be a slightly better place to do it. Robin: patch is a proof of concept -- might not be the right way to do it.
  • Markku: Brian is reviewing changes. Markku is reading documentation. Once he gets green light about resource management, will include it and start writing tests, particular performance tests. John asked about repository documentation. Markku will send email about documentation feedback. Good in that it tells you how to use the repository or a new parcel. No documentation on how repository itself is implemented. Will ask Andi.
  • Darshana: looked at software doing date parsing, and looked at Bear's code. Have been debugging and adding new features.

Status

Robin

• The new wx has landed! This closes Bug#5611, Bug#3876, Bug#4913, Bug#5249, Bug#5615, Bug#5786, Bug#5910, Bug#5968, Bug#5992, Bug#4859.
• Fixed the swiss-cheese splash screen, Bug#6114.
• Assisted with Bug#6137 and Bug#3727.
• Assisted with the crazy menubar problem on Mac.
• Assisted with Bug#6119.
• Worked on Bug#5650/Bug#3722, but havn't found an acceptable solution yet.
• Fixed a build bug dealing with the installation location of the .mo files on Windows.
• A couple minor changes to my SWIG patch to allow the generated code to be built with Python 2.5.
• Various other minor fixes and additions to keep wxPython up to date with some changes in wxWidgets.
• Various community support activities.
• Finished and sent in my slides for the wxPython tutorial at OSCON.

John

• Checked in a workaround for Bug#5956: winXP menubar icons have black background, which I introduced awhile ago.
• Helped Grant with bug to fix a failure some (most?) developers were seeing in the functional tests
• Fix Bug#6119: Search in toolbar missing on Windows XP and later. This turned out to be the dreaded CPU hogging bug that was caused by a text bar in the toolbar, which caused us so much grief in the past. I was lucky to find a very simple solution, which improved on David's previous buffered window fix for XP. I'm hopeful that we can get it submitted back to widgets.
• Made substantial progress on Bug#6127: detail view too big on startup
• Narrowed down the cause of Bug#5243: removing events from the preview area confuses sidebar painting.
• I suspect Bug#6127 or Bug#5243, might also be responsible for #5373: sidebar appears in grey chrome on mac upon restart

Markku

• Wrote a tentative documentation of the resource management system.
• Asked people to review the resource management system and the existing documentation.
• Waiting input from others, used the rest of the week to read the available Chandler documentation and to browse the Chandler source code.

Brian K

• Returned from vacation and caught up on OSAF development activities.
  
• Further work done on how best to integrate the loading of wx translation files in Chandler.
  
• Developing example eggs using Markku's i18n code and determining how best to streamline the API and integrate in to Chandler. The three test examples are 1. load translations registered in the egg from Python code with in the egg 2. load translations from an egg from Python code outside the egg 3. register translations for one egg from another egg.
• OSAF Apple laptop is not starting. Taking down to Apple store and hoping the issue can be resolved.

Reid

• Spent a lot of time trying to build a wx with the old toolbar
• Finally just reverted the changes that were done to switch toolbars and checked them in.
  • Hope to see old toolbar back after next wx
  • This inability to switch toolbars is disturbing
• when the new wx is rolled out, this should fix Bug#6123
• Ran functional tests on my 3 Macs (G5, PowerBook 1.6 GHz, and iMac G3 400 Mhz) to exercise Chandler as per John's request

Philippe

• Mostly worked on the EuroPython slides
  • Finally learned the intricacies of Unicode in Python, gettext(), PyICU, etc...
  • Updated slides with recent development from PyICU and Chandler
  • Corrected code sample in slides (PyCon samples actually didn't run... ooops...)
  • Rehearsed talk and demo
• Checked alpha3 issues with team