Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Should I switch to PyCharm?

After reading my yesterday’s blog entry, Hamza asked: “Do you use an IDE when coding? I am using Pycharm (Not an ad :p) and it helps me a lot to manage and deal with github repositories. For example to create branch and merge code.”

The question shows that he is a good assistent for me because he is not afraid of questioning my way of doing things.

It is funny that the question raises now for the third time: Two years ago (2013-11-19) Joe asked a similar question, and after quite some serious trying of switching to PyCharm, I switched… from Scite to Emacs. And a year later (2014-10-21 inspired by Manuel) I did a second attempt to switch to PyCharm, again without success.

So the answer is complex. Summary: I am reluctant

  • because some inner feeling says that PyCharm is too complex and makes me dependant of it

  • because I am happy with Emacs and see no need to invest the time it takes to switch.

Of course these are no rational arguments. I started ticket #520 because it is worth consideration. But I set the state to “Sleeping” because there are so many other urgent things to do.

(from /tickets/137.rst: Here are some of the problems which I could not solve during my second attempt to move from Emacs to PyCharm:

  • When I open some file, PC warns me about a problem:

    Package requirements ‘appy==0.8.4’, ‘django==1.5.1’ … [Install requirements] [Ignore requirements]

    And I did not find any explanation.

  • It seems that I must define a “run environment” for everything I want to run from PyCharm. Seems complicated. I prefer my Fabric.

  • I could not get any test run to execute. It looked as if Django was not installed.

  • Does PC support multiple Django settings per project?

  • Is it true that PC cannot easily wrap long lines into a paragraph?

  • Even with PC it is necessary to learn more about how to use Git.

Lino Così now needs lxml

I had problems testing Hamza’s work on #520 Così because I could install lxml:

$ pip install lxml
...
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lz
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1
----------------------------------------
Cleaning up...

The error message remained the same after the following:

$ sudo aptitude install liblz-dev
$ sudo aptitude install liblz4-dev
$ sudo aptitude install lzma

According to this thread it is because my machine has not enough memory!?

I tried Michael Plakhov’s suggestion:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=524288
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

No success until now.

7:25 : After some hours of sleep I had the glorious idea to look at the documentation instead of asking Google. It says rather clearly:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep lxml
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  debhelper dh-apparmor libpython-all-dbg libpython-all-dev libpython-dbg
  libpython2.7-dbg libpython3-all-dbg libpython3-all-dev libpython3-dbg
  libpython3-dev libpython3.4-dbg libpython3.4-dev po-debconf python-all
  python-all-dbg python-all-dev python-dbg python-pyrex python2.7-dbg
  python3-all python3-all-dbg python3-all-dev python3-dbg python3-dev
  python3-setuptools python3.4-dbg python3.4-dev zlib1g-dev
0 upgraded, 28 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 52.3 MB of archives.
After this operation, 158 MB of additional disk space will be used.

Which was the solution. lxml contains C code (an extension module) and needs a lot of header and library files to get built, and build-dep is the easiest way to get them all in once.

Java

Manuel asked whether we want to continue paying for a code signing license. #531. Answer: No. Anyway we aren’t using it anymore for quite some time now. My own clients don’t need it, they just have to configure their browsers to accept my self-signed certificate. If some day somebody wants to provide out-of-the-box permission for my applets, then either sign them yourself or contact me.

To verify above statement, I discovered that Java does not yet work on Doll. Although /.java.policy file is the same as on Hoppel. #532.

First step: there was no JDK installed. For running the applets a RTE would be enough, but I’ll need the JDK for building my applets eidreader and DavLink:

$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre

And then I need IcedTea to get Java into FireFox:

$ sudo apt-get install icedtea-plugin

Finishing #520

Hamza has finished working on #520, now I must repair the test suite. Three cases were broken, two trivial ones and one less trivial: Accounting stuff in Lino (but also this one was actually just a question of import statements, and the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE still pointed to min2). A detail: he forgot to remove the module lino.modlib.declarations from Lino.

And then there was yet another plugin which needs to move to Così: lino_xl.lib.courses. Because it depends on lino_cosi.lib.trading. Hamza did not notice this because he did not try to build the docs.

Building the docs revealed some more dependency problems, mostly due to this courses plugin. The default Lino Cosi application does not include this plugin. But the plugin cannot remain in Lino since it depends on sales. That’s why we have lino_cosi.projects.std.settings.DocsSite now.

Changed the license of Lino Così from BSD to AGPL. This was the triggering reason why we did all this new design.

TODO: I must still adapt import statements and test suites in Lino Welfare and Renamed “Lino Faggio” to “Lino Voga”.

A bug in atelier

Building the docs (fab bd) failed with this traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/python2.7/site-packages/fabric/main.py", line 743, in main
    *args, **kwargs
  File "/python2.7/site-packages/fabric/tasks.py", line 427, in execute
    results['<local-only>'] = task.run(*args, **new_kwargs)
  File "/python2.7/site-packages/fabric/tasks.py", line 174, in run
    return self.wrapped(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/work/atelier/atelier/fablib.py", line 914, in build_docs
    write_readme()
  File "/python2.7/site-packages/fabric/tasks.py", line 171, in __call__
    return self.run(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/python2.7/site-packages/fabric/tasks.py", line 174, in run
    return self.wrapped(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/work/atelier/atelier/fablib.py", line 1341, in write_readme
    """ % env.current_project.SETUP_INFO
KeyError: 'name'

This was #533. Had to replace p = Path().absolute() by p = Path().resolve(). A side effect of #473.

Skype

Skype had disappeared with my move from Hoppel to Doll. A thread on askubuntu.com helped me to solve it. It seems that indeed the name of the key in the GSettings configuration database has changed after Ubuntu 13. But I have no explanation why it has been working on Hoppel then. Anyway here is how I solved it:

$ gsettings get com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist
No such schema 'com.canonical.Unity.Panel'

$ gsettings get com.canonical.indicator.messages applications
['thunderbird.desktop']
$ gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.messages applications "['thunderbird.desktop', 'skype']"
$ gsettings get com.canonical.indicator.messages applications
['thunderbird.desktop', 'skype']

I also installed dconf-tools and dconf-editor and learned about the GSettings database