Thursday, October 25, 2018

“Active” versus “Exposed” course states

I wrote some documentation about courses : Managing courses and fixed a vocabulary problem which had been existing for a while but turned out to be particulaily disturbing for Lino Tera:

We have the concept of “active” course states. People can ask to to see only “active” courses. This is a default filter parameter for quite some views. Certain course states are considered “active” and therefore visible by default in these views.

The problem with this concept is that it was called “active”. The word “active” is quite popular as a course state as well. So I changed the name of the state attribute to “exposed”.

I renamed CourseState.active to CourseState.is_exposed, and accordingly Courses.show_active to Courses.show_exposed.

Cannot show “editable” property of a workflow state

There was another name clash regarding workflow states: lino.mixins.registrable.Registrable requires its state field to have a property is_editable instead of editable. An attribute editable exists also on actors, and choicelists are actors.

Jane was slow

Jane was slow because something was using up memory on saffre-rumma.net:

$ free -h
                 total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
    Mem:          1.9G       1.9G        60M        39M       500K        41M
    -/+ buffers/cache:       1.8G       102M
    Swap:         1.0G       1.0G         0B

After a reboot it was better:

$ free -h
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
    Mem:          1.9G       1.0G       945M       5.7M        37M       211M
    -/+ buffers/cache:       767M       1.2G
    Swap:         1.0G         0B       1.0G

We’ll see whether the problem comes back.

inv release should create a branch, not a tag

I created #2599 and asked Google about “git tag vs branch”. And indeed, stackoverflow.com confirmed my feeling:

Q: How is a tag different from a branch in Git? Which should I use, here?

A: A tag represents a version of a particular branch at a moment in time. A branch represents a separate thread of development that may run concurrently with other development efforts on the same code base. Changes to a branch may eventually be merged back into another branch to unify them. (…)

I used Algus as a guinea pig. But the work is not finished.

A historic release for ÖSHZ Eupen

Today, one month after the last release attempt, we finally managed to get them to the new version. ÖSHZ Eupen is one of our biggest sites, and it was an exciting challenge to develop the “secure release procedure” (explained under Installing a preview site). Lino is reaching the next level. Thanks to Gerd and Steve for their rigourous and competent help.

Release Lino Avanti

As if the release in ÖSHZ Eupen wasn’t enough, and as a contrast, I also did an upgrade of the Lino Avanti production site in a one-step procedure (explained under Upgrading a production site). Tonis watched me and had no problems to understand what was going on.

Data migration:

• User.timezone is now User.time_zone

• create_comments_comment as described in blog/2018/0219.rst

Miscellaneous changes during manual testing on production data. For example the default value for CourseStates.auto_generate_calendar is now False.

Release on The Lino framework

Tomorrow I plan a Lino presentation to Thierry, probably using our public Online demo sites. So I did a third deployment in one day: upgrade on The Lino framework. This one is simple and runs unattended. Just a global git pull followed by a pm prep.