Thursday, December 14, 2017¶
The straw that breaks the camel’s back¶
The latest Sencha Product Roadmap Update might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. “What’s the position on future GPL releases?” was the first question after this post. It was asked by Chris Alfano from Jarvus two weeks ago. And their answer is void.
This observation is only one of many.
In their post It’s Back: Ext JS Single Developer License (December 1, 2017), Robert Warmack writes “I am sure a lot of you have questions. We have addressed several questions below and encourage you to check out our updated FAQ page. If there are additional questions that we have not yet addressed, please do feel free to send them to feedback@sencha.com.”. I sent them my question:
Getting support for the GPL community version
I read the latest blog post and yes, you have our continued support, and we feel a part of the Sencha Community, and our old question is still unanswered: how can we contribute to the community given the fact that we refuse to use the non-GPL parts of ExtJS?
And their answer –so far– is: silence.
Their download page for the GPL version starts as follows:
For developers that are willing to release the source code to their applications, Sencha provides an open source licensing option for these frameworks. To use this license, you must follow the terms of the GPL v3; see highlights below.
I am not a lawyer, but AFAICS this summary of the GPL is factually wrong. The GPL does not oblige you to release your code when it is being used only within your own company. The obligation comes only when you want to make make money by giving your code to other people. Yes, in many cases the result is the same, but presented like Sencha do it, it looks as if they want to discourage us from using the GPL version.
All this tells me that Sencha does not care a bit for their GPL community. I had been hoping that ExtJS’s new managers are wiser than those before.
It is sad but seems true: we should stop working on the ExtJS user interface and rather invest our time into something that deserves our work.
My suggestion: we switch back Jane to ExtJS3, stop working on ExtJS6 until we have a clear and positive statement from Idera about these questions.
Testing under both Python 2 and 3¶
Yesterday and today I grew my experience with writing tests (unit and doctest) that work under both Python versions… There were 45 failures when I started.
atelier.utils.rmu() now honors Mike Orr’s unipath.Path
objects which happen to print differently under Python 3.
Added a new function atelier.utils.sixprint().
>>> from builtins import str
>>> import six
>>> s = str("aei")
>>> isinstance(s, six.string_types)
True
Thanks to http://python3porting.com/problems.html I discovered the IGNORE_EXCEPTION_DETAIL doctest flag which handles differences in exception formatting.