Everything technical » Python

Surfing

lucabotti — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:57:15 +0000

Sometimes I get lost in the Web, just following links after link for new ideas, following a vague plan of action, multiplying tabs and relying on browser’s session restore capabilities and tab and bookmark syncing.
Tonight, after a full day of work, the gym, the dinner and some chatting with my lovely wife, I had one of this session on the sofa (thanks to netbook magic, the fully working Samsung NC10 with F12 and about 4hrs battery life..).
Anyway, I discovered some interesting projects. the first is a Django powered software forge (think sourceforge plus trac): basie is a MIT licensed software which is growing up from an academic world, and I shall admit to find it intriguing, and an interesting candidate to the trac position.
Next one is the Python Buildhaus Project, which goal is to setup a build system for Python packages against multiple architectures / OSes / python environments: infrastructure will be provided by the Snakebite project, which goal is to make available as many platforms as possible to test open source software builds.
Finally, a nice old blog entry regarding TDD AntiPatterns.
Lot of stuff. Will keep an eye on those (and perhaps contribute to basie, who knows…).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

Building RPMs, part two – Pinax

lucabotti — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:55:33 +0000

Ok, so now we have the environment complete. First thing I want to package is Pinax. This is a nice little collection of Django applications which add some required stuff for most of web based applications.

On the link above you will find all the info for the project, so let’s start. We will build the release version of Pinax (for development versions I have a side project, which I will show you at right time). Please note – all the release used are current for the day this entry has been written.

Download pinax version 0.5.1 from here and put it in rpmbuild/SOURCES. After that:

cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS

rpmdev-newspec -t python pinax

Rpmdev-newspec creates the skeleton for a new spec file named pinax. The -t python option tells to create a skeleton with some python definitions in it (python definitions are laid out according to this wiki entry on the Fedora Project Wiki); you can see which skeletons are available looking in ‘\etc\rpmdevtools’.

Why Python? Well, my guess is that being DJango a Python framework, you know….

Let’s look at the spec file and put some info into that. You can use any editor for the file (I use geany, fast and lightweight).

# sitelib for noarch packages, sitearch for others (remove the unneeded one)
%{!?python_sitelib: %global python_sitelib %(%{__python} -c “from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()”)}
%{!?python_sitearch: %global python_sitearch %(%{__python} -c “from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib(1)”)}

Name: pinax
Version:
Release: 1%{?dist}
Summary:

Group: Development/Languages
License:
URL:
Source0:
BuildRoot: %{_tmppath}/%{name}-%{version}-%{release}-root-%(%{__id_u} -n)

BuildArch:
BuildRequires: python-devel

I am assuming that Pinax is a pure python package, so we use the sitelib for noarch packages (first line of the two provided). After that we have to insert some descriptive info of the Pinax project.

But, of course, before going ahead we must check some of the Pinax dependencies.

Continuing tomorrow…

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

OpenERP and workflow management

lucabotti — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:47:23 +0000

The starting point for the steps I am showing on this blog has been my desire to initiate a project about project management, called princess.

The not so original name derives from the fact that the software will be loosely based on the Prince2 Project Management Methodology. For the uninitiated, Prince2 is based on a set of rules and processes to manage projects, more lightweight (apparently) than PMP.

From my point of view, processes and workflow management go hand-in-hand, and so a background task in my brain has been polling (and googling) about workflow libraries in Python.

A week ago, while searching other stuff, I met OpenERP which, at a first sight, has an interesting workflow management component. Also, the entire project is evolving from a complete application to a set of components, so my hope is to leverage the power of FLOSS here, adopting a component from another, gpl licensed software. Further licensing investigations are on the way.