[Dev] CSG Sprint Summary

[Ted Leung]

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>

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Ted Leung                 Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF)
PGP Fingerprint: 1003 7870 251F FA71 A59A  CEE3 BEBA 2B87 F5FC 4B42