[Chandler-dev] [Sum] May 15 - 21

Wed May 31 09:47:53 PDT 2006

Build, release, QA
------------------
*Checkpoint build*
Bear's link to the checkpoint build on May 15:
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005907.html
Dan's testing report of the checkpoint:
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005910.html

*Alpha2 status*
Philippe noted that 17 bugs were still open on alpha2, and listed the
bugs that required investigation before the bug council could triage them.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005917.html

Heikki later noted that 5 bugs remained for alpha2, and that we were
looking at Tuesday (May 23) as the release date.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005926.html

*Subzilla in subversion*
Jeffrey wrote a command line utility for posting and applying patches
to/from bugzilla (subzilla).
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005904.html

Proposals and discussion
------------------------
*Proposal for a startup-options dialog*
Bryan proposed adding a mechanism to put up a dialog on startup if the
user held down a metakey. The dialog would allow the user to throw out
the non-user data in the repository, throw out the entire repository,
and/or send the repository to OSAF. The goal would be to support users
who run into problems but aren't comfortable with the command line. He
also noted that we see a class of problems with the UI items where the
user's data may be salvageable.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005901.html

John, Andi, Alec, Philippe, Morgen and Dan +1'd the proposal. Philippe
asked for a bug and a PPD proposal. Morgen suggested adding the ability
to roll back the repository to a past version.

Heikki pointed out that it would be useful to try and automatically
recover the database where possible. He argued against installing
utilities that are rarely used, suggesting that these be separate
downloads. (He and Andi had a separate discussion about including
command line db utilities).
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005918.html

Bryan and Alec both replied that the dialog proposal is not intended to
solve the whole recovery problem, just the short term problem of users
we see today who are not power users, but do need to deal with a broken
repository.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005919.html

Heikki noted that he's working on a talkback feature for alpha3. He also 
noted that  a metakey is not accessible to people with disabilities. He 
argued that we could/should try and automatically detect problems with 
UI data and reload that, instead of asking the user.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005921.html

Bryan replied that there is value in making this available in the short
term for many, even if it is not accessible to people with disabilities.
(The command line is an option for folks with disabilities). The point 
here is just to make the task we are already asking of end users today 
just a bit easier, letting them avoid the command line.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005923.html

*stamping as annotations*
Grant replied to the "stamping as annotations" question. Grant noted 
that the adapter terminology is used by zope.interface, which Chandler 
happens to link against because of twisted. He noted that it provides an 
API for discoverability, flexible adaptation, and "stamping/unstamping" 
(per-instance adoption and removal of interfaces, like stamping's 
cluster of attributes). Grant brought up two open issues. (1) Would we 
keep the current Kind composition approach to stamping under the covers? 
It seems that this is necessary for the existing collection and index 
code to work, and might be tricky. (2) Recurrence and stamping makes 
one's head hurt. In the long term, it would be good to have recurrence 
be less tied to event-ness, which might help make stamping easier. Grant 
noted that encapsulating recurrence logic with an annotation might serve 
us well in the long run, making view merging, recurring tasks, and other 
things easier or cleaner.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005908.html

Alec encouraged us to look more carefully at zope.interface. He argued 
that the mechanism used to provide an "adapter" is orthogonal to the 
mechanism used to keep related items together "stamping". Alec noted 
that zope.interface addresses traversing/creating/discovering stamp 
relationships, but not other issues like how to persist the object.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005909.html

Phillip Eby (who later revealed himself as the co-author of 
zope.interface, in addition to being the annotations creator) gave a 
stake-in-the-ground implementation for "stamp", based on Annotation. He 
argued that zope.interface doesn't buy us much, noting that this 
implementation would work now, without interface registration. Phillip 
answered Grant's question about Kind composition, noting that the 
attributes are just normal attributes and should be persisted and 
indexable just like any other attributes. He noted that performance 
considerations could suggest some other way of tracking active stamps, 
if storing stamp types as a set was a problem.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005911.html

Meetings, announcements, noted projects
---------------------------------------
*Apps meeting*
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005925.html

*Chandler engineering meeting*
Intel mac support was one of the topics for this meeting.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005927.html

*Collaborative QA Session*
Mikeal announced an irc testing session to hit qacosmo (0.3 cosmo) with 
several clients. (The session was Thursday, May 18).
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005924.html

Bear pointed us at a web based multi-user editor
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005900.html

Philippe pointed us at a forum on Python on Nokia S60.
http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/2006-May/005930.html