Articles on AR's Blog

Test post

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 18:34:07 +0000

Testing for permissions

Week 12

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Sat, 29 Aug 2020 02:40:54 +0000

As discussed in our weekly meeting, I'm wrapping up testing on the gsoc_year migration and #363

Week 11

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 17:27:41 +0000

Looking at the highest priority bugs and how to generate the required batch of all my changes from git.

Week 10

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 17:26:38 +0000

I've been working on PEP8 fixes and overall code layout cleanup, appended commits to existing PR.

Week 9

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 17:46:35 +0000

Fixed #392 and submitted PR. Moving on to #363 and #392

Week 8

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 08:01:18 +0000

Just a brief check-in. Setting up a MySQL environment for manual testing on a mac mini and then moving on to tickets #362 and #363.

Week 7

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 06:19:27 +0000

I'm on my fourth rewrite of the ManyToMany migrations, on one hand really wanting to learn to do this right, but on the other this only applies to two fields and for past suborg applications: years that the suborg applied but was not selected, and years the suborg participated in GSoC. Its questionable how important retaining this data is.

On a personal note I've been having a lot of trouble focusing on GSoC work. Three kilometers from me we've had police and now federal paramilitary soldiers attacking protesters, blanketing he region around our federal courthouse in a thick blanket of chemical weapons, and challenging the inalienable right to free speech that serves as a foundation our democratic republic. We often hear gun shots at night (which we hope are at least rubber bullets and not lethal ammunition) and terrifying news reports of my neighbors being wounded, even our mayor being tear gassed. This has persisted for 2 months now, for the duration of GSoC with no end in sight.

Work must continue, but is made especially difficult by all this. Its been an exercise in learning how to center myself so I can focus on my work.

Week 6

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 05:58:57 +0000

I've been continuing on the code cleanup and database, running face first into Django's dreaded ManyToMany. This bridges into a related problem of having a binary sqlite3 database in the code repository instead of a proper testing framework where temporary databases are created by the testing tool.

Work is available in PR but not ready for merging yet.

Week 5

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 06:59:33 +0000

I've set aside Django 3 migration work for a bit to focus on cleaning up the codebase and database queries.

Week 4 (belated)

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 06:58:09 +0000

I've been continuing to migrate to Django 3, which at this point should only be pending updating the unit test suite. Since this work has involved pulling several abandoned dependencies into our source tree and many of these tests use obsolete methods of running, this has involved a tedious migration to Django's newer test framework.

The code so far is on a pending Github pull request, pending completion of the test suite migration but by all appearances otherwise complete.

Week 3

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 12:33:56 +0000

I've continued work on upgrading to Django 3 - which has turned out to be a lot more involved than originally suspected. At this point aldryn_categories and aldryn_people have both needed to be pulled into the repository tree since they're also abandoned projects that were abandoned prior to upgrading for Django 3 (though the actually changes needed in them was minimal, they won't work as-is with Django 3). Every time I've thought I was close I've discovered new problems.

One of the recurring problem I've been hitting is making sure to completely clean these as independently installed Python packages while pulling them into our source tree, though I think I have all the dependencies sorted out at this point I've learned the best policy is to wipe out all the Python packages on my test instance and reinstall them from requirements.txt.

And with this blog post my blog posts required count should return to 0, making up for the first two weeks when my administrative access needed to work on the side prevented me from posting.

Week 2.5

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 22:25:57 +0000

I've been working to finish our update to Django 3 (which includes moving from aldryn newsblog as a dependency to an incorporated app). I've hit a lot of frustration doing this but am wrapping this up tonight.

I've also been working on general code cleanup, primarily replacing database queries that assume a single result with better queries and checking the results. This code seems to be causing a vast majority of bugs - especially with returning students.

GSoC week 2 check-in

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 07:13:10 +0000

This is a quick check-in post to keep the blog count happy (most of this was covered in weekly mentor meeting)

I've wrapped up work on #394 and #396, then started work on #370, #383, #387, and #400.

GSoC week 1

ArcRiley@gmail.com (AR) — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 17:47:12 +0000

This week I've been largely focused on blog posting bugs, notably #394 and #396. These two bugs are not actually part of the python-blogs codebase, but the now-abandoned aldryn newsblog projected which we use as a dependency.

Since aldryn_newsblog is abandoned and its repository set permanently read-only, the first step was pull that module into the python-blogs tree. After spending a few hours unsuccessfully attempting to merge aldryn_newsblog's commit history into a python-blogs branch, then merge its branch with the master, I gave up and just copied aldryn_newsblog's final version as a subdirectory (abandoning its 5 years of commit history in the process). Someday, if anyone really cares and has more git experience than me, they can always run this merge "correctly".

$ pip uninstall aldryn_newsblog

Uninstalling aldryn-newsblog-2.2.1:
Would remove:
/usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/aldryn_newsblog-2.2.1.dist-info/*
/usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/aldryn_newsblog/*
Proceed (y/n)?

So long global module, hello local module, and - the website still works.

I'm now staring at the mess that is our tag cleaning. There appears to be at least three HTML cleaners used by the python-blogs codebase, but embarrassingly I found most of #394 can be resolved by adding tags to gsoc/settings.py and appears to have almost nothing to do with aldryn_newsblog.