Runs on python 3: checkoutmanager¶

Tags: python, django

Checkoutmanager is a five-year old tool that I still use daily. The idea? A simple ~/.checkoutmanager.cfg ini file that lists your checkouts/clones. Like this (only much longer):

[local]
vcs = git
basedir = ~/local/
checkouts =
    git@github.com:nens/syseggrecipe.git
    git@github.com:buildout/buildout.git
    git@github.com:reinout/reinout-media.git
    git@github.com:rvanlaar/djangorecipe.git

[svn]
vcs = svn
basedir = ~/svn/
checkouts =
    svn+ssh://reinout@svn.zope.org/repos/main/z3c.recipe.usercrontab/trunk

In the morning, I’ll normally do a checkoutmanager up and it’ll go through the list and do svn up, git pull, hg pull -u, depending on the version control system. Much better than going though a number of them by hand!

Regularly, I’ll do checkoutmanager st to see if I’ve got something I still need to commit. If you just work on one project, no problem. But if you need to do quick fixes on several projects and perhaps also store your laptop’s configuration in git… it is easy to forget something:

$ checkoutmanager st
/Users/reinout/vm/veertien/efcis-site
 M README.rst

And did you ever commit something but forgot to push it to the server? checkoutmanager out tells you if you did :-)

Porting to python 3. The repo was originally on bitbucket, but nowadays I keep having to look all over my screen, looking for buttons, to get anything done there. I’m just too used to github, it seems. So after merging a pull request I finally got down to moving it to github.

I also copied over the issues and added one that told me to make sure it runs on python 3, too. Why? Well, it is the good thing to do. And… we had a work meeting last week where we said that ideally we’d want to run everything on python 3.

Two years ago I started a django site with python 3. No real problems there. I had to fix two buildout recipes myself. And the python LDAP package didn’t work, but I could work around it. And supervisord didn’t run so I had to use the apt-get-installed global one. For the rest: fine.

Recently I got zest.releaser to work on python 3 (that is: someone else did most of the hard work, I helped getting the pull request properly merged :-) ). For that, several test dependencies needed to be fixed for python 3 (which, again, someone else did). Checkoutmanager had the same test dependencies, so getting the test machinery to run was just a matter of updating dependencies.

What had to be done?

• print 'something' is now a function: print('something'). Boring work, but easy.

• Some __future__ imports, mostly for the print function and unicode characters.

• Oh, and setting up travis-ci.org testing. Very easy to get both python 2.7 and 3.4 testing your software that way. Otherwise you keep on switching back/forth between versions yourself.

  (There’s also ‘tox’ you can use for local multi-python-version testing in case you really really need that all the time, I don’t use it myself though.)

• Some from six.moves import xyz to work around changed imports between 2 and 3. Easy peasy, just look at the list in the documentation.

• It is now try... except SomeError as e instead of try... except SomeError, e. The new syntax already works in 2.7, so there’s no problem there.

• The one tricky part was that checkoutmanager uses doctests instead of “regular” tests. And getting string comparison/printing right on both python 2 and 3 is a pain. You need an ugly change like this one to get it working. Bah.

  But: most people don’t use doctests, so they won’t have this problem :-)

• The full list of changes is in this pull request: https://github.com/reinout/checkoutmanager/pull/9 .

• A handy resource is http://python3porting.com/problems.html . Many common problems are mentioned there. Including solution.

  Django’s porting tips at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/python3/ are what I recommended to my colleagues as a useful initial guide on what to do. Sane, short advice.

Anyway… Another python 3 package! (And if I’ve written something that’s still used but that hasn’t been ported yet: feel free to bug me or to send a pull request!)