Hi folks,
Last Friday we held a Chandler parcel sprint with some of the attendees of the CSG Technical Update <http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/ ChandlerTechnicalUpdateApril2005>. A number of OSAF staff also attended the sprint. Out of all the attendees, Chao was the only one to get a parcel up and running by the end of the day. Heikki was pretty close to getting his parcel running, and now has his parcel running. Raymond Yee and Tom Schirmer from UC Berkeley also came pretty close to getting their parcel running. I spent a few hours this week helping them get the final changes in. Many of the CSG folks were encouraging about the progress that we have made and were understanding of the sharp edges that we ran into. We recorded the problems that we ran into in the wiki (see below), and will be converting that feedback into bugs for 0.6 and 0.7 as appropriate.
Here are some of the major issues that we ran into:
Many of the problems that we observed at PyCon repeated themselves, in terms of error-prone namespace URI's and lots of files whose names needed to match exactly. We also need to do a much better job on documentation, not only around the tutorial, but in terms of references -- the types available for use, the elements that can be used in the detail view, etc.
We spent about 1 hour and 45 minutes resolving issues related to setup of one kind or another. This included problems with getting PARCELPATH passed through the Macintosh end user build, problems getting the -c flag passed through RunChandler.bat on the Windows build, and some last minute hiccups with new versions of the skeleton app. There are a number of small but important changes that we can make in 0.6 to make these problems go away.
Debugging parcels is a problem because it is hard to find the log files, and some messages go to the logs while others go to dialogs.
It also seems clear that we need a "Hello World" sample parcel which is aimed at "unsophisticated" developers -- this covers a broad category of people, including people coming to Python for the first time (there were a number of these folks in the audience). This sample / skeleton should probably consist of a single parcel.xml file and a single Python file (after we get the Python schema API in, then this would be a single Python file).
If you are interested in the raw feedback, you can look at the wiki page for the sprint: <http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/ ChandlerTechnicalUpdateApril2005SprintNotes>
---- Ted Leung Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) PGP Fingerprint: 1003 7870 251F FA71 A59A CEE3 BEBA 2B87 F5FC 4B42
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