[Dev] PyCon comments

[Phillip J. Eby]

This was a rather different year for me.  There were a lot of talks that I 
had wanted to attend, but they typically were running at the same time as 
other talks I wanted to attend, *and* at the same time as OSAF talks, and I 
often still managed to miss *all three* due to hallway conversations.

Of course, the hallway conversations were me "networking" with the 
luminaries of other projects, including the "Zope Pope" himself, Jim 
Fulton, on the future of Python eggs.  The Zope and Enthought folks have a 
lot of interesting overlaps with Chandler's requirements for a Python 
plugin system, library builds, etc., and I spent a lot of time laying the 
groundwork for co-operation and uptake that will help ensure that Chandler 
is part of a bigger picture of software reusability in the Python community.

Of course, the real benefit of PyCon is always networking; talks are really 
just an excuse to get people with similar interests in the same room at the 
same time, which I guess helps explain why they're usually so short, 
allowing people to get the presentations out of the way quickly and get on 
with the networking.  :)

I wasn't all that productive during the sprints, unfortunately, as I was 
still getting my replacement laptop up to speed most of the first 
day.  Mostly, I was on call for Python questions, egg questions, etc., but 
I did get to a ZFT* on the code for parcel loading from eggs.  But the 
second day we had a nice design meeting on schema evolution/upgrade issues, 
and made some good progress.  After the other OSAF folks left, I ended up 
helping some of the Zope sprinters set up some Zope tests to run under 
setuptools, and going to dinner with them.  My flight didn't leave until 
today, Wednesday, and I just got in a few hours ago.

(*ZFT = Zero-Functionality Test, i.e., the code doesn't break for the 
"empty" case, i.e., the parcel loader still works when you don't have any 
eggs for it to load.)