On 24 September 2013 14:07, <exarkun@twistedmatrix.com> wrote: <snip>
Woo. Hope you guys had fun. Thanks for the report, Richard.
Yep, it was a good day. There were a few things that could have gone better. Here are a few thoughts. * Easy Tickets In hindsight, I should have prepared a selection of suitable tickets. The "easy" tickets search is useful, but many of them have been worked on already and it's difficult to choose which of these are suitable for sprint contributors without reading through the history. One of the tickets I chose had already been mostly completed and the remaining work (filling in missing docstrings for mail avatar tests) was impossible for me to explain, let alone for the new contributors. The "documentation" ticket report is also useful, but with our current version of trac, there's no way of dynamically creating a report which looks for "easy" AND "documentation" keywords. New versions of trac allow this I think. Meanwhile we could write a custom SQL report for this. And again it requires a little preparation to select tickets which haven't got complications. * Windows Development Two of the guys were running windows and I struggled to help them set up a working development environment. This evening I found this page by cyli which might have helped, but probably needs updating. * https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TwistedDevelopment#Win32development * Working in pairs Anyway, we soon gave up on Windows and they paired up with the others who were running Linux, and that worked well. * Dev Requirements It would be nice to have a dev-requirements.txt file so that they could easily install the necessary development tools. pydoctor, coverage, nevow, zope.interface, twistedchecker, etc See: * https://github.com/hynek/structlog/blob/master/dev-requirements.txt * Nevow One of the guys was trying to run the documentation tools and we all got thoroughly confused by the many broken links to Nevow. The official link is https://launchpad.net/divmod.org ...but it doesn't include a link to documentation. There are these unofficial links and yet these are linked to from the Twisted docs. https://launchpad.net/divmod https://launchpad.net/nevow The pypi package is well out of date and has a broken project link https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Nevow/0.10.0 The documentation has a broken download link. http://divmod.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ It's such a shame that Nevow got into this state and that it isn't easier to install. It's fantastic software - especially Athena. And I was always partial to Formless too. There was even a lightening talk from a guy touting his *new* pythonic system for generating HTML ie STAN! * Combinator (or alternatives) I've always used combinator to switch between Twisted branches, but it would nice to have some documentation of non-combinator development methods...what tools do people use to update their paths when they switch between branches? I suppose with git you don't have to. Is it worth considering putting combinator on Pypi? * Git Some of them struggled to get a complete subversion checkout (due to dodgy conference wifi I think) and tried to use git instead. It would have been helpful if I'd re-read the latest Twisted git documentation in preparation. It explains how to create a diff containing just the local changes to a checked out branch. * https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/GitMirror * The Django Sprint By contrast, the neighbouring Django sprint was much better prepared. They'd run a series of tutorial sessions earlier in the conference, on how to contribute to Django. So their sprinters hit the ground running. * https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-developers/7JFKNoYl2EU * http://dont-be-afraid-to-commit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ It's a good idea but a lot more work I guess. Anyway, next time I'll know and maybe it'll be a little easier. -RichardW.