Blog-O! (Posts about drproject)

How to start developing Basie

Blake Winton — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:03:24 GMT

So, first off, I think Python developers these days need to use stuff like virtualenv and zc.buildout in order to develop in a sane manner. Yeah, this is the first project I’m using them on, but do what I say, not what I do.

Anyways, on to the instructions.

sudo easy_install virtualenv
virtualenv --no-site-packages basie
cd basie/
. bin/activate

Then, you’re gonna need a buildout.cfg. Mine looks like this:

[buildout]
parts = django
eggs = ipython

[django]
recipe = djangorecipe
version = trunk
settings = development
eggs = ${buildout:eggs}
project = basie
wsgi = true

You’ll also need a bootstrap.py, which will look a little something like this:

##############################################################################
#
# Copyright (c) 2006 Zope Corporation and Contributors.
# All Rights Reserved.
#
# This software is subject to the provisions of the Zope Public License,
# Version 2.1 (ZPL).  A copy of the ZPL should accompany this distribution.
# THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
# WARRANTIES ARE DISCLAIMED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED
# WARRANTIES OF TITLE, MERCHANTABILITY, AGAINST INFRINGEMENT, AND FITNESS
# FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
#
##############################################################################
"""Bootstrap a buildout-based project

Simply run this script in a directory containing a buildout.cfg.
The script accepts buildout command-line options, so you can
use the -c option to specify an alternate configuration file.

$Id$
"""

import os, shutil, sys, tempfile, urllib2

tmpeggs = tempfile.mkdtemp()

try:
    import pkg_resources
except ImportError:
    ez = {}
    exec urllib2.urlopen('http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py'
                         ).read() in ez
    ez['use_setuptools'](to_dir=tmpeggs, download_delay=0)

    import pkg_resources

if sys.platform == 'win32':
    def quote(c):
        if ' ' in c:
            return '"%s"' % c # work around spawn lamosity on windows
        else:
            return c
else:
    def quote (c):
        return c

cmd = 'from setuptools.command.easy_install import main; main()'
ws  = pkg_resources.working_set
assert os.spawnle(
    os.P_WAIT, sys.executable, quote (sys.executable),
    '-c', quote (cmd), '-mqNxd', quote (tmpeggs), 'zc.buildout',
    dict(os.environ,
         PYTHONPATH=
         ws.find(pkg_resources.Requirement.parse('setuptools')).location
         ),
    ) == 0

ws.add_entry(tmpeggs)
ws.require('zc.buildout')
import zc.buildout.buildout
zc.buildout.buildout.main(sys.argv[1:] + ['bootstrap'])
shutil.rmtree(tmpeggs)

After you’ve got those, it’s basically:

python bootstrap.py
buildout -v
django help
django runserver

And when you’re done, deactivate

Any comments on things that don’t work would be highly appreciated.

How to add Markdown to your PyBlosxom Blog.

Blake Winton — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:16:41 GMT

Hopefully this all just works. Include A&B, and 4 < 5.

Headers

Smaller headers

Blockquotes.

Lists
of
things

Blocks of python code could be here.

etc, etc.

Okay, so now that I’ve determined that it works, here’s how I did it: I added a new entry parser, called pymarkdown.py, to my plugins directory. The content of the code looks like this:

FILE_EXT = 'md'

__version__ = 'pymarkdown 0.1'
__author__ = 'Blake Winton &lt;bwinton+python@latte.ca&gt;'

import markdown

try:
    from Pyblosxom import tools
except ImportError:
    pass

def cb_entryparser(entryparsingdict):
       """
       Register self as markdown file handler
       """
       entryparsingdict[FILE_EXT] = parse
       return entryparsingdict

def parse(filename, request):
    """
    We just read everything off the file here, using the filename as
    title
    """
    entrydata = {}

    f = open(filename, "r")
    lines = f.readlines()
    f.close()

    # strip off the first line and use that as the title.
    title = lines.pop(0).strip()
    entrydata['title'] = title

    # absorb meta data lines which begin with a # and consist
    # of a name and a value
    while lines and lines[0].startswith("#"):
        meta = lines.pop(0)
        meta = meta[1:].strip()     # remove the hash
        meta = meta.split(" ", 1)
        entrydata[meta[0].strip()] = meta[1].strip()

    # join the rest of the lines as the story
    story = ''.join(lines)
    story = markdown.markdown( story )
    entrydata['body'] = story

    return entrydata

And you’re done.

I guess you might be wondering why I would bother doing that, since both Amy and I are obviously comfortable writing straight HTML. Well, DrProject is switching from a custom-built Wiki-ish-syntax parser to a third-party Markdown parser, and I figured this would give me a bit of a headstart on getting used to the new syntax, and also give me a bit of a playground for testing out new features that I might want to add.

Sprinting on DrProject.

Blake Winton — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:14:42 GMT

On Friday and Saturday afternoon this week, I took some time out of my day to go down to the University of Toronto and participate in the DrProject Code Sprint. It was a lot of fun, and I managed to fix a couple of bugs, and get a better understanding of one of the hairier parts of DrProject. At least I hope it’s one of the hairier parts of DrProject, since if the whole codebase is as ugly as the wiki parts, we’re in some serious trouble. To be fair, it’s a not-entirely-deterministic parser for a not-entirely-deterministic language, so when something goes wrong, it’s kind of, uh, tricky to figure out what’s just happened. For example, after parsing a link surrounded in square brackets, the following character seems to be treated as text. Why? Who knows. As someone new to the wiki parser, I’ld love to have the code be simpler to understand, but I’m starting to suspect that the complexity is inherent in what it’s trying to do.

The two bugfixes/feature additions I did, although they seem sort of unrelated, both work together to let people create a bibliography/set of footnotes to pages, which is something Greg said that he’s been wanting for a while, so that was kind of cool. It’s nice to be able to go somewhere, be surrounded by smart people, and concentrate on making something better without interruptions.

Speaking of the bugfixes, they were:

adding support for dl/dt/dd in the wiki syntax, which turned out to be surprisingly hard, since it seemed to be the first bit of syntax that wanted to either return more than one tag or insert a tag into the already-generated stream, so I had to figure out which option to go with, and how to get it working, and
coming up with and implementing a wiki syntax for creating and referring to anchors in a page, which I think I did a pretty decent job on. The syntax uses [wiki:#foo] as an anchor, and [wiki:MyPage#foo] as a link to that anchor

Installing DrProject.

Blake Winton — Wed, 09 May 2007 21:28:58 GMT

Just because that would be too easy by itself, I'm going to follow the instructions for Cygwin, and we'll see what happens.

Okay, it's going fairly well so far...
And then I get to step 3:

Download, compile, and install sqlite from sources. Use version 3.3.5.

To compile it, I use "./configure", "make", "make install", but that gives me the following error:

$ make install
tclsh ./tclinstaller.tcl 3.3
can't read "env(DESTDIR)": no such variable
    while executing
"set LIBDIR $env(DESTDIR)[lindex $auto_path 0]"
    (file "./tclinstaller.tcl" line 10)
make: *** [tcl_install] Error 1

This page tells me to remove each occurance of "$(DESTDIR)" from Makefile, so I did, and it still didn't work, so I tried commenting out "HAVE_TCL = 1" and then it all seemed to work just fine.

Until I got to the line:

chmod +x /lib/python2.4/site-packages/pysqlite-2.2.2-py2.4-cygwin-1.5.19-i686.egg/pysqlite2/_pysqlite.dll

which failed, but it was easy enough to change it to:

chmod +x /lib/python2.4/site-packages/pysqlite-2.2.2-py2.4-cygwin-1.5.19-i686.egg/pysqlite2/_sqlite.dll

which worked.

Running

drproject-server --debug --port 8080 --auto-reload --create=/tmp/drproject

gave me the error:

drproject-server: error: --create option does not take a value

So I tried

drproject-server --debug --port 8080 --auto-reload --create

which said:

drproject-server: error: incorrect number of arguments

So I finally tried

drproject-server --debug --port 8080 --auto-reload --create /tmp/drproject

and it seemed good.

Finally, I ran

drproject-server --debug --port 8080 --auto-reload /tmp/drproject

And it was good...

So I created a script called "drproject-server-profile", to profile it, containing the following lines


#!/usr/bin/python
# EASY-INSTALL-ENTRY-SCRIPT: 'DrProject==1.0dev-r2084','console_scripts','drproject-server'
__requires__ = 'DrProject==1.0dev-r2084'
import sys
from pkg_resources import load_entry_point

import profile
profile.run("sys.exit(load_entry_point('DrProject==1.0dev-r2084', 'console_scripts', 'drproject-server')())", 'profile.tmp')

and here is the data!