20130409 (Tuesday, 09 April 2013)¶

I moved from my 4-year-old Acer Aspire 7000 with Windows XP to a HP ProBook 4540s with Ubuntu for my daily work. This revealed some minor problems like stray CR-LF newlines in some files.

These ones took me quite some time although the reason is rather the new Django version than the new environment:

The exceptions “Using remote authentication, but no user credentials found” and “Unknown or inactive username %r. Please contact your system administrator” raised by lino.utils.auth.RemoteUserMiddleware were PermissionDenied. This caused Django 1.5 to not show the exception’s message at all, even on a development server with DEBUG set to True. Now it’s again a “normal” Exception, causing an email to the admins if it happens.

Django 1.5 and the SECRET_KEY setting¶

Many tests failed under Django 1.5 because it refuses an empty SECRET_KEY setting.

I created Django ticket #20227 “Accept an empty SECRET_KEY when DEBUG is True”, but they didn’t agree. So I need to either update all test cases and instructions or set a trivial default value for it. I choose the latter, at least as long as there is no better solution.

How to login through ssh without typing your password each time¶

On the client (the machine from which I want to login to a remote server):

(py27)luc@hoppel:~$ ssh-keygen -t dsa -f .ssh/id_dsa -P ''
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Your identification has been saved in .ssh/id_dsa.
Your public key has been saved in .ssh/id_dsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
4f:a8:35:74:f7:5e:ac:7e:2d:5f:c5:8d:f3:94:57:51 luc@hoppel
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ DSA 1024]----+
|               .E|
|                .|
|        . . .   .|
|       . o . . ++|
|        S .   +.O|
|       o +   . *o|
|      .   .   o +|
|             .. +|
|              .+.|
+-----------------+

(py27)luc@hoppel:~$ scp .ssh/id_dsa.pub luc@remote-host-org:~/
luc@lino-framework.org's password: ***
id_dsa.pub                                    100%  600     0.6KB/s   00:00

On the remote host:

(demo)luc@remote:~$ cat id_dsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys
(demo)luc@remote:~$ rm id_dsa.pub

(Thanks to http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~ranga/notes/ssh_nopass.html for the cheat sheet)

Sphinx cannot embed stylesheet¶

When I run fab docs for lino on hoppel, then Sphinx 1.2b1 and docutils 0.10 say “Cannot embed stylesheet ‘…docutils/writers/html4css1/html4css1.css’: No such file or directory.”, or more exactly:

<partial node>:: (ERROR/3) Cannot embed stylesheet '../../../\
pythonenvs/py27/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/docutils/writers\
/html4css1/html4css1.css': No such file or directory.

(Workaround: use docutils 0.9)

Incompatible changes to LOGGING config in Django 1.5¶

Ouch, Django 1.5 has changed how to Configure logging:

Prior to Django 1.5, the LOGGING setting overwrote the default Django logging configuration. From Django 1.5 forward, the project’s logging configuration is merged with Django’s defaults, hence you can decide if you want to add to, or replace the existing configuration. To completely override the default configuration, set the disable_existing_loggers key to True in the LOGGING dictConfig. Alternatively you can redefine some or all of the loggers.

It took me some time to find out that even setting disable_existing_loggers to True doesn’t help: Django will call my LOGGING_CONFIG function twice, once with hard-coded default values, then another time with the local settings:

if self.LOGGING_CONFIG:
    from django.utils.log import DEFAULT_LOGGING
    # First find the logging configuration function ...
    logging_config_path, logging_config_func_name = self.LOGGING_CONFIG.rsplit('.', 1)
    logging_config_module = importlib.import_module(logging_config_path)
    logging_config_func = getattr(logging_config_module, logging_config_func_name)

    logging_config_func(DEFAULT_LOGGING)

    if self.LOGGING:
        # Backwards-compatibility shim for #16288 fix
        compat_patch_logging_config(self.LOGGING)

        # ... then invoke it with the logging settings
        logging_config_func(self.LOGGING)

This is not a nice change! Sigh! Opened Django ticket #20229 to see what they think about it.

Where is the MergeAction?¶

The Merge action (lino.core.merge) had disappeared. Because it was added using the post_analyze signal. But (after a change during the last weeks) that’s too late, must use pre_analyze. Actions defined on the model are “inherited” by each table on that model. Since this inheriting is done during the analyze phase, our customization must happen before.

New method lino.core.model.Model.define_action() to make this type of customization more bullet-proof. TODO: define_action should raise an Exception if it is too late (because some tables on this model have already been initialized).