Apps Team Meeting 14 September 2006

Agenda

• Question du Jour : (5 min) What do you think of the March "Preview" date?
• Alpha4 status : (10 min) Feature freeze is next week. We still have a bunch of tasks (even considering only P2 and P3) up in the air. We'll do a thorough round table on this and see how we fare.
• Alpha5 and beyond : (10 min) I started to create and assign tasks that do appear on the sticky plan but not in Bugzilla. I also started to move some out of 0.7 altogether. I'll give an update on this action of mine (I'm on the home stretch now) and, of course, will like to hear from the people I've been adding/moving things.
• Issues and Announcements : (10 min) Our usual agenda entry. I'm fully expecting a discussion on the functional tests which have been a drag on our productivity this week. What's the state of the problem? What can we do to improve this situation?
• Misc: Nothing on my end but please feel free to interject.

Summary

• Progress
  • Digging through alpha4
• Plan
  • 0.7alpha4 : keep making progress on the various feature areas
  • 0.7 : assign bugs and tasks to relevant milestones (on the home stretch...)
  • Tinderbox and functional tests : fix this so it's not a drag on productivity

Minutes

Question du Jour : What do you think of the March "Preview" date?

• Bryan and John: not sure there's consensus on the definition of what is "Preview", feel this is a moving target, that's the biggest concern
• Brian: feel fine about it
• Reid: feel good but his expectation is "good calendar and everything else is bonus"
• Jeffrey: good to focus on a date though we haven't really nailed down the feature set

Alpha4 status

• John: Focusing on the sidebar. Mocked up alternatives, would appreciate feedback before he moves forward. Features are OK but has a lot of bugs piling.
• Bryan: Was rolling along then hit a big one with recurring events. No strategy found yet despite discussion with Jeffrey and Grant. Needs more discussion. Might not be solved for alpha4.
• Brian: email will need few more days. Won't be ready for Tuesday.
• Reid: will use stubb for the email toolbar. Experiment with expandos.
• Jeffrey: fine with his tasks, few bugs, will help John after he's done.
• Markku and Philippe: done with French and Finnish l10n.

Alpha5 and beyond

Philippe on the home stretch on assigning stuff. Will need SWAG so that we can start making serious triage.

Issues : Functional tests and Tinderboxes

Discussion on the functional tests which have been a drag this week. What's the state of the problem? What can we do to improve this situation?

• John: let's be more careful checking things when tinderbox is broken, logs became more complicated and are impossible to decipher, hard to even find the traceback in there.
• The current solution (do_test) is too slow and it's not even what tinderbox is doing. We need to run the tests in a way which is consistent across devs and tinderboxes.
• We have too many random failures that go unexplained. That's bad because we stop trusting the system. Then when it breaks there's no guarantee that the commit is really the culprit.
• We should lower the criticity of the parcels failures (Flickr for instance).
• We should have a different set of tests for network failures, especially when testing against Cosmo-demo.
• Idea: run Cosmo test on a local (on the tinderbox machine) Cosmo instance so we avoid network issues?
• Opportunities to simplify the way tests are written, tests are easy to write but it's hard to figure out where they fail
• Action -> Take test TestTableSelection on Linux and TestRemoveFromTrashOnImport on OS X out temporarily
• Action -> Need a meeting with Mikeal, Heikki, Dan and devs so we solve this

Status

Brian

• Your status here...

Bryan

• Several productivity busters this week: the network outage messed up my development world, and I spent a lot of time working on functional tests (either investigating failures, or trying to get them to run consistently in different conditions).
• Hit a wall with a couple of different dashboard features, trying to get them to work with recurring events (see bug 6700).
• Stole berook's machine to use as an ubuntu box.

Darshana

• Worked on Bug#6694. Posted a patch for it.
• Worked on a few more bugs in ParseDateTime library
• Worked on Quick Item Entry(Bug#6470) and made changes which Mimi and Jeffrey suggested. Ran into problems while implementing 'Deleting the command after it is executed' and 'Persisting the command on losing focus'. Finally got it working with Bryan's and Jeffrey's help.
• Working on documenting both NLP in detail view and also the quick item entry(CLI for dummies)
• Reading more about other projects especially the documentation on Contacts Parcel done by Ernesto Rivera.

Jeffrey

• discussion and fix for floating point/locale strangeness, Bug#6688
• Bug#6666, posted recurrence code new tests and fix for bugs associated with recent recurrence model changes
• zanshin and vobject work for Bug#5923, set timezone when creating calendars
• Bug#6620 and Bug#6256, zero duration events need to be treated specially or they aren't included in ranges
• Bug#6547, changing views and changing recurrence don't mix well in certain edge cases.
• Bug#6248 and Bug#3727, calendar canvas inPlaceEditor needs to be closed when date ranges displayed change
• Bug#6673, minicalendar was checking the week but not the year when doing week highlighting
• Bug#6115, mini-calendar fails to reflect multi-day events
• Bug#6494, reindex floating events when the timezone changes, which unfortunately contained a silly mistake which caused Bug#6696 (now fixed)
• Bug#6265, expanding and contracting preview area
• Bug#6635, unsubscribing from a read only collection creates an incomplete TimedCanvasItem

John

• Implemented new sidebar icons: bug#6569. However, I thought the design need improvement, so I implemented 2 alternatives and submitted them to the design list for review.
• Lost considerable productivity this week becuase the tinderboxes weren't running tests most of the week. Also, when I run the tests they occasionally start failing with different random errors -- then mysteriously start working again.

Markku

• Closed Bug#6657: Proof-of-concept localization of Chandler and HOWTO document. This task was completed in a collaboration with Philippe and resulted in an almost complete Finnish translation of Chandler and a wiki page that documents the steps that are needed to write new translations. I also wrote a list of known issues in the current implementation and presented it for discussion in our devlist.
• Based on the previous clause I opened new bugs Bug#6722:Remove word catenations that are impossible to internationalize, Bug#6723: Remove word translations from words that are not ment to be translated, and Bug#6725: Make createPot.py generated pot file GNU gettext compatible.
• Received my MacBook^? laptop and installed python with all the relevant libraries.
• Checked that the latest release of the first generation project management tool does in fact work on a Mac. The experiment was successful and no changes were required.
• More work on the second generation project management tool: I have already created a rough framework for a webapplication that uses TurboGears and SQLAlchemy-ActiveMapper. There is still some work on the learning curve to find the best way to implement everything but the first step has been taken.
• Helped Darshana to test the i18n support of her parsedatetime package integration with Chandler.

Philippe

• Finalized French l10n, logged bugs related to l10n
• Alpha4 monitoring with devs
• Started dispatching of Bugzilla entries to alpha5 and alpha6, logged missing bugs, moved some to Future, etc...

Reid

• Marked Bug#6142 as fixed. May have been fixed by John's work on standardizing command IDs
• Marked Bug#5906 as fixed. Toolbar finally has a proper search bar! Many thanks to Stefan for his help on this.
• Fixed Bug#6674 since it was quick to do. Markup bar buttons now have distinct rollovers for pressed versus unpressed states.
• Worked on expando addressing fields - Bug#5304. Experimented with how static fields switch to editing fields.
• Worked on adding mail-specific tools to the toolbar - Bug#6439. Having them appear and disappear makes it tricky.

Robin

• Integrated updates from Stefan for the toolbar code. Verified that the memory corruption bug is solved.
• Rolled out the r100 wx tarball to Chandler, updated WxPythonProject page. This also allows Bug#6500 to be marked as fixed.
• Fixed Bug#6632: Can't edit text fields in Account dialog
• Marked Bug#4859 (Make CompositeDropTargets work) as fixed. I think it has been fixed for a long time but I've never been able to duplicate it to be sure.
• Back ported the wxRenderNative changes I did for the col header work to wxWidgets CVS.
• Updated wx.gizmos.TreeListCtrl from the wxCode project and modified it to use the new renderer changes.
• Various community support activities via email and IRC.

-- PhilippeBossut - 14 Sep 2006