Paul Swartz’s PCF Devblog

As I’m sure anyone who reads this blog has noticed, Chris Webber and I released the brand-spanking-new version of the Miro Guide.  I’m incredibly proud of the work that we did on it, and I hope that you all like it too.

Translations: With a brand-new site come a bunch of new strings.  At the moment, the most-translated language (Slovenian) still has 116 untranslated strings.  If you’ve got some time, please sign up for Launchpad and translate some strings!

Features: Although I’ve got a bunch of ideas for where I want the Guide to go, I also want to hear from you!  Will turned on voting in Bugzilla, so go vote for your favorite features.  If you don’t see it there, feel free to add it to the list; maybe other people want it, too.

I got through 11 bugs this week, 10 of which were for Miro.  #10896 (Newly Available badge displayed too frequently) and #10988 (Chicklets don’t update counts for folders) were the hardest because I didn’t know much about the new messaging system.  Working on them was good, though, because now I know a lot more

Today I started working on Guide stuff again.  We’ve got 3 (really 2) P1 bugs that have so far eluded debugging and fixing.  I added some pretty verbose debugging in for #10993 (Feed Updater Running?) so hopefully that will generate something useful.  I also put up some new code for #10972 (Fix the Miro Guide Feeds) which hopefully will limit the number of new items that Miro tries to download.

I’ll be helping Chris out with Guide stuff next week, assuming no new cobranding bugs pop up.  I have one outstanding enhancement for the cobrander (uploading files to OSUOSL) but that’s lower-priority than MG3 stuff.

I didn’t work New Year’s Eve, but I had a great time hanging out with my girlfriend and her family.

The rest of the week has been spent working on Miro Guide 3.0.  I got through 4 bugs (#11005, #10977, #10997, #10996) and sent two more (#10965 and #10958) to Dean for review.  I spent yesterday and today cleaning up the templates and template-related code to remove stuff we’re not using.  I also fixed about a third of the failing MG test cases, the ones that were simple to fix.  There are more where the functionality has actually changed (ChannelSearchTest in particular) and so the tests need a more thorough updating.

I took a leave of absence the past four months to travel around the United States and Europe.  (Check out my personal blog for those tales).  I’m happy to say that I’m back to work on the Miro Guide along with Chris Webber.  We’re working on the redesign and it’s looking great.

     556 text files.
classified 538 files
     499 unique files.
     180 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.04  T=61.0 s (6.0 files/s, 772.1 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Python              185      4403      2428     25212 x   4.20 =      105890.40
HTML                 89       198        87      8411 x   1.90 =       15980.90
CSS                   4       616        24      2752 x   1.00 =        2752.00
Javascript            6       109       545       754 x   1.48 =        1115.92
SQL                  65        94       130       504 x   2.29 =        1154.16
XML                   6        10         0       359 x   1.90 =         682.10
Bourne Shell         12        54       135       274 x   3.81 =        1043.94
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                367      5484      3349     38266 x   3.36 =      128619.42
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some of us have been talking about Git on IRC the past week. I spent today (well mostly my laptop spent the day) importing the Miro SVN respository into a Git repository with git-svn. Just importing all the history took about 4 hours, although I think a lot of that was spent just doing the downloading. The initial checkout was 1.7GB,
with 1.3GB of that taken up by Git bookkeeping. After a repacking,
that number dropped to 865M, with 457MB being bookkeeping. Not too
shabby, considering having a branch, a tag, and trunk all checked out with SVN take up 2.4GB and don’t have all the history immediately available.

I haven’t really used it for development yet, just copied my outstanding changes from my old checkout. We’ll see how that goes
next week.

Mostly this week was bug fixes:

• #9866: Uninstall doesn’t remove themes
• #9902: Search w/in channel not being saved
• #9901: crash when downloading video from the Guide
• edit box acts strangely in the Guide
• loading bar doesn’t appear for the edit box
• error on search-more-items page with unicode queries

I did add a couple new features to the Guide and its API. The Guide now
displays “Subscribe in Miro” buttons if you’re visiting in a browser,
and the API allows one to rate channels and get recommendations. I
haven’t added the documentation about that to the wiki page yet, but
I’ll be doing it soon.

Last week I was working on getting the installer to pretend that an installed theme was attached (for https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/OpenCobrand) and #9866 (Uninstall doesn’t remove themes). I also fixed a bug in the Effortless Good update.rdf file which was preventing it from being upgraded. I added a bit of new UI to the Guide around the recommendations code so that people without ratings aren’t left out to dry. I also worked with Dean finishing up the cobrander. Hopefully we’ll release that soon.

This week I’ve been working on getting Flash to work in Miro on GTK. I’ve had no real progress, though. That’s what I’ll be working on this week as well.

I spent last week working.on bugs. I got through:

• #9554: –theme causes problems with the tray icon
• #9829: Long cobranded titles are cut off in the installer
• I Heart Miro breaks lots of extensions

This week I’ve been working on OpenCobrand which is a system for making cobranded builds a little more independent
of me and Dean and Jesse. The public builder works pretty well but I’m running into some
trouble with making the installer pick up the new theme.

At the moment, I’m try to use this Locate NSIS plugin to find the themes that are
installed. It’s working in my small tests, but not in the actual Miro
installer. I’m not confident that I’ll be able to get it fixed for a
1.2.3 release, but because it only affects cobranded builds NPR and I
were thinking we’d make a 1.2.3.1 “release” to the cobrander but not
publicize it.

I got a bug report report from Nils Maier about I ? Miro breaking other extensions because of how it detected HTTP redirects. Nils also helped me out by showing me what I should be doing, which made the fix easy. I’ve released I ? Miro 1.3.7 and Effortless Good 1.1.6 which fixes the problem.