20140702 (Wednesday, 02 July 2014)

After some hours of sleep I looked back at what I learned and did yesterday.

First of all, I optimized the pavement.py file once more: the self-signed version is in example and the signed version in example/signed. No longer in two siblings called example/mykey and example/codegears. After years of fiddling with the Makefile, this was a mere joy since we are now in Python.

fabric versus paver

Then I asked: why did I not use fabric instead of paver?

Answer: because I wanted to try something new. Because I did not feel fully satisfied with fabric…

But let’s verify that feeling. I simply copied the content of pavement.py into the fabfile.py, made some minor changes, and the result is amazing: it gets yet more elegant because unipath has a needs_update and a copy method. Yes, I liked paver’s path trick to override __divide__ operator, but the child method in unipath is more explicit and secure.

My resolution: fabric is clearly better than paver. fabric can easily do what paver did, has better documentation and is more mature.

$ git rm pavement.py
$ pip uninstall paver

BTW my feeling came mainly from the fact that I don’t really like the output of fab -l…

A pitfall in unipath

I fell into a pitfall with unipath. The first one after more than a year, and -after thinking at it- an unevitable one. Here is an excerpt from some of my code:

jarfile = outdir.child(n)
libfile = LIBDIR.child(n)
if libfile.needs_update([jarfile]):
    libfile.copy(jarfile)

In a first attempt I had written:

if libfile.needs_update(jarfile):

which gave me a strange traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
  File "/home/luc/hgwork/eid/fabfile.py", line 40, in sign_jars
    if libfile.needs_update(jarfile):
  File "/home/luc/pythonenvs/py27/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/unipath/path.py", line 298, in needs_update
    if p.isdir():
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'isdir'

Yes, the documentation clearly says that the argument to needs_update must be an iterable, and that Path objects behave like strings… and to avoid that pitfall, unipath would have to test on each whether it is a directory or not… so my suggestion is to just update the documentation to warn about this pitfall.

Automatic refresh every 10 seconds

Added a button “autorefresh” which causes the home screen to start refreshing every 10 seconds. Opening any window stops the autorefresh.

This is a quick workaround, not yet very user-friedly:

  • no feedback indicating that it is activated.

  • no protection against repeated clicks. every click starts a queue of autorefreshes.

TypeError: expected string or buffer

Lino made an Internal Server Error when reading a Belgian eID card which had the following address data:

streetAndNumber: null
zip: null
municipality: null

This caused me some work:

  • Added a new test case for which reproduces the problem.

  • Discovered that these test cases were not being tested anymore. Now they are, but I am not yet fully satisfied with how this is being done. They are in lino_welfare/projects/docs/tests (not in /tests, because they are written for the Django test runner. But the general test suite now invokes a django-admin test in this directory).

  • These test cases need to specify no_local=True because they need e.g. use_java.

  • Added the case of an incomplete birth date to the docstring of lino.utils.ssin.

  • The bug itself (in ml.beid.BaseBeIdReadCardAction) was of course easy to fix.