Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Deprecated behaviour

The django_settings_module attribute was meant to solve exactly the same problem: how to specify the settings.py module to be used when testing a document using doctest. I have the feeling that we should deprecate this old-style and intransparent (“automagic”) behaviour now that we have the new settings_modeul argument for lino.startup()

I noticed that lino.utils.pythontest and lino.utils.djangotest were missing in the API docs. And yes, the Testing Lino applications page is still very uncomplete.

About communication and Lino Noi

It’s now almost one week (Thursday, October 8, 2015) that I released the new comments feature (#522). But we didn’t yet start to use it. Even I didn’t. And actually I knew it in advance.

There are several good reasons why we didn’t:

  • Lino Noi will never replace individual communication channels (E-Mail, Chat)

  • I seem to stick to my habit of writing in my daily blog using Emacs and Sphinx (Start your own developer blog)

What do we want Noi to be?

  • Lino Noi does not want to replace E-Mail and Chat clients, but it wants to integrate them. E-Mail and Chat clients stop to be optimal where more than two persons are involved into a discussion. Lino Noi wants to be a tool which sustains and keeps track of communication within a group.

  • Another basic goal is to have a knowledge database. That we can ask in five years “Did we have this problem already? How did we solve it?”.

Questions to those who followed until here:

  • Am I missing important goals?

  • Are we reinventing the wheel with Lino Noi?

Some concretely missing features are:

  • Notifications. Currently it is a hell because every little change generates an email to the reporter and the assigned user.

  • Collect incoming mails and assign them to their ticket (i.e. that any user can forward any mail to an address (e.g. incoming@lino-framework.org), and these mails would go into our database and become visible to all other users. (This is partly implemented in lino.modlib.smtpd and lino.modlib.outbox. Something similar for collecting chat logs and interactive terminal sessions.

  • Add some checkboxes “Blog”, “chat” and “mail” on clocking.Session which indicate “there are traces of this session in the author’s Blog, Chat or Email”. Add a field devblog_url_template to users.User and make the public interface generate automatic links to the blog entry.

#589

I started to work on #589. It is related to the following message which comes each time when I register an invoice:

INFO Found 0 VAT rules for %{'date': u'09.10.15', 'country': u'BE',
'vat_regime': <vat.VatRegimes.private:10>, 'vat_class': <VatClasses.normal:2>}!)

Yes, of course lino_cosi.lib.tim2lino.fixtures.tim2lino must also create VAT rules.

The solution was to simply add euvatrates lino_cosi.lib.vat.fixtures.euvatrates> to their demo_fixtures

So it turns out that #589 was actually just another facet of #554.

Afterwards I continued to work on #554. This ticket is about importing data of a TIM database into a Lino Così (more precisely a lino_cosi.projects.apc). Changes are mostly in lino_cosi.lib.tim2lino.

En passant I updated some documentation.