Friday Sorrento sprint blogging¶

Friday was pretty relaxed, as some 3/4 of the participants took the opportunity to visit the ruins of Pompeii in the afternoon. Did you know that Nate discovered proof that the Romans used Plone?

On thursday, we took the group photo. It is a very pleasant sprint, as is visible from the photo. Some 50 or 60 people turned up, with quite a number of first-time sprinters amongst them, which is great news for Plone's future. I haven't yet heard any negative sound about the sprint (apart from the speed and reliability of the internet connection, ah well). The hotel is good. The evening dinner is pretty good. The staff is very friendly. The bartender is pleasantly nuts.

I really should start to bug some people tomorrow moning on the various groups' sprint progress, otherwise I would only chat on about cachefu :-) As I haven't done that yet, you'll all forgive me that I mention that we've integrated the PageCacheManager settings into CacheFu's genericsetup profile. This brings the list of completed items from the original list to two: fixing the unittests (as far as currently practical, there are some plone 3.0 issues left) and finalising the genericsetup support.

I and Machiek did most of the work while pair programming. It was a first for me to have two full days of pair programming. I did some of the work on my own late in the evening, but that's probably OK. I'm enthousiastic about it. You both learn things. You both make simple mistakes that the other one catches immediately. You can discuss ways to approach the problem. You transfer knowledge. You see each other's way of working.

I got some more very valuable input from Philip and Wichert. In short: using events for hacking into the publishing process might be possible after all. Core to this is to raise an exception if cachefu detects that a "304 not modified" is in order of if a cached version of the page is available. There's code available (plone 3.0 has it build-in) that monkeypatches zope's publisher to look up views for errors instead of blindly spewing out an error page. Wow! The 3.0 code can be used for 2.5, too, so that looks promissing.

This is a really big change. For CacheFu. Getting this to work would be a great result of this sprint. We've got some days left to get it to work. Maciek, are you up to it? :-) *If there are others that want to help work on this: feel free. CacheFu is pretty important and there's a limit to what Maciek and me can accomplish in this sprint. There are also still the other useful tasks left... :-)

One other remark: I'm extremely happy with instancemanager . It is a tool for managing instances: creating them, backing them up, installing products (symlink, svn bundle, tgz), running tests, etcetera. All based on a reasonably simple config file. When I started this sprint, I had already a plone 3.0 config (see instancemanager for your plone 3.0 ) and a plain plone 2.5 config. After creating the "sorrento" bundle of cachefu, getting that installed in an instance took about a minute: copy plone25.py (the 2.5 instancemanager config) to cachefu.py, change the portnumber, add the sorrento bundle to the config, run instancemanager cachefu fresh. Done. Same for cachefu3.py, to get cachefu running inside a plone 3.0 site. No (in my eyes) elaborate in-location downloads of all software in a separate location as ploneout seems to do it. Just effectively a "mkzopeinstance" in a location of your choice while grabbing the bundles from your already-downloaded svn locations. Real quick and convinient.

Now, off to bed.