[Chandler-dev] Re: status

[Grant Baillie]

Hi, Ernesto

Answers to your questions are inline below. I'm CC:ing Chandler's  
development list (chandler-dev at osafoundation.org); in general, if you  
have questions about Chandler architecture or code, or comments on  
tutorials or documentation, this is a good place to post them.

If there are issues blocking you, I'd suggest starting out on  
#chandler @ FreeNode, although be warned that there's a long weekend  
coming up in the U.S. (Monday is Memorial Day).

Cheers,
--Grant


On May 25, 2006, at 8:05, Ernesto Rivera wrote:

> ...
>
> These two first weeks I'll be working at home, far away from the  
> city, and where I have only a dial-up connection. Later I should be  
> connected via ADSL.
>
> Anyway I plan to go tomorrow downtown and download all the big  
> chandler files to start. I would like to know what should I download:
>
> - Chandler latest release 6.1 (or a 0.7 alpha?) to get familiar  
> with chandler.

For the purpose of getting going on working through the feeds  
tutorial, I'd suggest going with the 0.6.2 release. There have been  
some changes in 0.7 alpha, so that document is a little out of date.  
I'll be updating it in the next couple of days: the changes mainly  
have to do with how the feeds code is packaged, not the code itself.

That said, there's an unfortunate bug (in 0.6.x, on the Mac) with  
developing against the end-user distribution, so I'd suggest doing  
the following:

- Do a (readonly) checkout of the 0.6.2 Chandler sources via:

bash$ svn checkout http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler/branches/ 
0.6.2/chandler chandler

- This puts the chandler python sources in the folder chandler. Then,  
download the libraries and external python modules you'll need by doing:

bash$ cd chandler
bash$ make install

You can then run Chandler from that directory by:

bash$ ./release/RunChandler

(see the tutorial for more information, including command-line  
switches).

> - Source code (is there a compressed file, I didn't find one yet).

All the python code Chandler uses is included in the above svn  
checkout. (Actually, it's also included if you do an end-user  
download: this is one of the joys of using an interpreted language  
like Python).

It's unlikely you'll need it, but you can get the full source code  
(i.e. the python sources, plus sources for the C/C++ libraries we  
link against, and the python interpreter itself) on the downloads  
page <http://downloads.osafoundation.org/chandler/releases/0.6.2/>.

> - API and code documentation (is there an easy way to DL it all so  
> I can consult it offline?).

I don't believe there's a separate download for those. However, if  
you've done the subversion checkout above, you can find the tutorial  
and friends under chandler/distrib/docs. Our API docs are generated  
from comments in the source; if you want to generate those, do (from  
the chandler dir):

$ ./release/RunPython ./tools/gen_docs.py docs

will create documentation in the directory docs.

> I will be revisiting Python, as it's been a year and a half since I  
> last used it. By the way what tools could you recommend it to edit  
> the code. Is there an easy XCode integration, etc? (I will be  
> working on os x).

Here's an overview of various Python IDEs:

<http://wiki.python.org/moin/IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironments>

Around here, I think Wing and pydev (i.e. the Eclipse plugin) are  
probably the most popular.

XCode, as of version 2.2, does understand enough about Python to do  
syntax coloring and indexing (i.e. have functions/methods/classes  
appear in the drop-down at the top of the file you're editing, and  
complete symbols in the editor). There's no integrated debugging  
support, though. Lately, I've been doing my editing in Xcode, and if  
I need breakpoints, I insert them as described here:

<http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/ 
DebuggingChandler#Debugging%20with%20PDB>

(That page has useful info on debugging in various environment, BTW).