Wednesday, March 22, 2017

I poked around in Jane and tidied up (#268). This includes a few more optimizations: projects are now sorted by reference. Deployment.remark now a plain textfield (instead of charfield).

The end of the Vilma project?

Today I stumbled over rahvaalgatus.ee and CitizenOS. And I am afraid that this means the end for the Lino Vilma project.

The last weeks have shown that the Lino Vilma project is a full-time job. It takes a lot of time to find volunteers who would become village agents, explain them why they should help us, analyze their needs and optimize Lino Noi so that it can be used. And the first thing most people say is “I cannot operate it using my phone, then I will certainly not use it”. This means that #1078 and #1078 need to come soon as well. And there are at least a dozen of cool features in CitizenOS which we didn’t even yet think about. Turning Lino Noi into something comparable to Uservoice will cost more than a man-year. I am afraid that Rumma & Ko simply don’t have the capital for investing all that work!

And then the question whether it should be done at all. My personal answer is clear: CitizenOS is really cool, but it seems that it is implemented using proprietary software owned by Uservoice. Tõnn London suggested already one year ago (in April 2016): “Võiksite lisada info tarkvara kohta, mida see portaal kasutab, et kas on avatud lähtekoodiga, kas saab kuskilt alla laadida jne” and he didn’t get any answer.

I started to write the following suggestion:

Nõuda rahvaalgatuse platvormi arendajalt lähtekoodi avalikustamine vaba litsentsi all

Rahvaalgatus.ee platvorm on üles pandud avaliku rahaga, kuid tubli osa sellest rahast läheb tarkvara tootjale Uservoice San Franciscos. See ei ole iseenesest probleem, aga kuna tarkvara lähtekood on ja jääb nende oma, siis läheb lõppude lõpuks kogu know-how riigist välja.

Ettepanek - Me nõuame, et rahvaalgatuse platvormi arendaja avalikustaks vaba litsentsi kogu lähtekoodi, mis platvormi käivitamiseks vaja. Kui nad sellega ei nõustu, siis tuleb uut arandajat leida.

Põhjendus - Praeguse lahendusega annab Eesti rahvas oma raha, aega ja energia selleks, et suurendada kellegi välismaa tarkvaraomaniku võimekuse. Seda peaks võimalikult kiiresti lõpetada.

It needs of course much courage and naiveness to hope that above petition might get 1000 votes. But such thoughts are not a reason to give up before you even tried…

Technically the site uses Raven.js, the browser JavaScript client for Sentry. Sentry is a nonfree solution for collecting and analyzing JavaScript tracebacks.

BTW it is funny to see how close their basic idea matches my basic idea of the Lino Vilma project : the processes used for developing software can be reused for making democratic decisions. So actually CitizenOS and rahvaalgatus are a confirmation that we are targeting the right thing.

EDIT: Later Tanel heard that CitizenOS are indeed planning to go open source. If this is true, then it will be cheaper for Vana-Vigala to start using this eisting platform. So the Lino Vilma project goes to sleep now.

Miscellaneous optimizations

Today I continued to do occasional quick upgrades of our Jane.

  • height of insert_layout of a Deployment must no longer be ‘auto’.

  • Choosing a milestone with label 20171231 fails because Lino interprets it as numeric. I adapted a demo fixture and tickets (Ticket management in Noi) to document the effect. I fixed this by defining a quick_search_filter method as in Referrable.

More ideas todo: - Session action buttons : write comment - Start a new session on a ticket as soon as you start a comment. - Make sessions readonly when they are earlier than a given date. - Prevent ticket state “working” when nobody is assigned. - The notification about a comment, at least when displayed in the dashboard, might include a link for replying.

Double release Welfare in Chatelet and Eupen

An unexplained error message during the restore in welcht was this:

Loading 25244 objects to table esf_clientsummary...
/usr/local/virtualenvs/b/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/db/backends/mysql/base.py:112:
Warning: Data truncated for column 'esf70' at row 1
return self.cursor.execute(query, args)