An abridged PyCon report (also see Ted's blog, www.sauria.com/blog) OSAF had a big presence at this year's Python. So did everyone else, it sometimes seemed, the conference center was filled nearly to bursting. I enjoy crowds, so this was actually a plus from my perspective, but it seems pretty clear that the conference can't be held in the Cafritz Center again next year.
The Chandler sprints went well. Our three new-to-Chandler sprinters seemed to have a pretty good time, an OSAF developer to new person ratio of 2:1 resulted in a fun and relaxed couple of days, there were bumps along the way but I don't think the sprinters ever felt like they'd fallen into a well and couldn't get out. The resulting parcels weren't as easy to produce as we want them to be, but we're clearly moving forward. After the sprints, the conference proper began. There were lots of good presentations, the one that cried out to me the most was the py.test presentation. py.test seems like a really nice testing framework, it would be great to use it for Chandler development. Outside the conference, I had a couple of really good Chandler-related connections. Philip Gaudette was at the Chandler sprints last year, since then we've corresponded occasionally about the state of Chandler and ways he might be able to help. He's still interested in helping. He was looking for useful, but low-pressure store-and-forward kind of projects, I suggested he consider helping get vCard working well in vobject which would certainly help Chandler. Philip's also interested in working on a framework for pluggable grammars for choosing and ranking autocomplete suggestions. Sounded like something OSAF isn't likely to put resources into in the near future, but if code dropped in our lap I think it would be a very cool addition to Chandler's UI. I also had a good long talk with Nick Bastin, who's working on Python bindings for ICU, a mature internationalization and localization package. My main interest in ICU was surrounding datetimes. I'll say more about that in a separate email, but lest I forget, here I'll point out something Nick mentioned in passing: ICU is approximately 8MB. I balked at the idea of adding 8MB to our download size, he said MAYBE we could distribute different packages for different locales and lessen the ICU download hit. I'd been expecting that we'd definitely be creating different locale packages, Nick made me realize this at least needs some discussion. As usual, I really enjoyed working in person with other OSAF folks, not something I commonly have a chance to do. Sincerely, Jeffrey _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Dev" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
