One of the bigger news stories from this year’s OSCON (well, at least from what my co-workers have said, I’m not there :) seems to be the announcement that Google has a new Project Hosting service. Looks very clean and simple so far but I am having trouble seeing what projects are already in it as you only are presented with the ubiquitous search bar and a “sample” of tags. Simply clicking on the “Search Projects” button with the search field empty gives you an error message instead of a chance to browse projects.

To check it out I went ahead and added my parsedatetime (yes, I renamed it) to the service and it was fairly painless. Not a lot of metadata available but the basics seem to be covered. You can add owners or members to your project and it also has an issue tracker – I’ll have to try that out later.

Once I added the project I then did an initial checkout of my new project but it seems the example URL they give you for the checkout pulls the trunk directory – probably a good default but I was wondering if they were going to allow branches/tags – all your normal SVN stuff. I clicked on the “Subversion Repository” link and did see that they are available so I took another look at the URL and noticed that they specified “trunk/” so after removing that I was able to get my project directory with branches/ tags/ trunk/ just as I like it.

Now that I saw a sane directory structure I copied over the current (0.6) version of parsedatetime and added it and did the initial commit. Everything worked and while it was a tad slow, it was no where near as slow as SourceForge’s and on-par with others like Berlios, etc.

It will be interesting to see how it holds up after it is slashdot’d and digg’d — but I’m also wondering how many people move from SourceForge to Google. I’m not expecting a lot as Google doesn’t have many of the features that SourceForge has (home page customization, filespace) but I’m sure there will be a minor stampede :)

home life

I was sitting down to make an entry to update whoever does actually read this as to what is happening in my corner of the world, but as soon as I started mulling over what to call the title I was interrupted.

That interruption lead to another and now that I’m sitting down at the computer again I realize that the interruptions are exactly what has happened since my last post. Between the issues that occur from caring for my father-in-law, the issues from dealing with Elaine when she is having trouble dealing with her father, the central air unit failing and finding out that after 19 yrs it’s decided to stop working and all of the other issues — lets just say it’s been busy.

parsedatetime

Between all of the above I have managed to do some coding and I’m happy that the date/time parsing code is doing very well thanks to the help from Darshana (one of the OSAF interns this summer.) Between the code she has fixed/created and the code I’ve fixed from having her using it, the parsing is now even better and I think even faster — so much so that I’m actually thinking of submitting it to PyPI.

First tho, some serious reviews and re-factoring :) — oh, and I’ve changed the name.

Kagami

Another fun bit of code I’ve worked on is a set of small programs to aid in the mirroring of a CVS repository to a SVN repository – it’s name is Kagami, which is the Japanese word for “mirror”.

What the code does is monitor the CVS commits generating log/mirror data files and then another bit reads those data files and takes each CVS info item, collects them into batches and then creates a single SVN commit with the added/changed/deleted files and/or directories. Nothing really fancy to be sure, but it works. Now to wait for it to be tested in a “live” environment to see what bugs show themselves.

mozilla/webtools/

Things have also been busy with some of the Mozilla projects I help with. I’ve been reviewing tons of patches that Chris Seawood (aka cls) has been generating as he reconciles the in-production patched code and the CVS code base. I’ve also been working on some Tinderbox2 code and slowly been updating the SVN work I did to match the latest CVS codebase – not fast enough for timely I’m sure but I’m trying.

Hmmm, guess I did have something to write about after all ;)