- Alexis Métaireau
- Journal
- Code, etc.
- Notes hebdo
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- date
  2010-07-06

- category
  tech

Yesterday, as I was traveling to Tours, I’ve took some time to visit Éric, another student who’s working on distutils2 this summer, as a part of the GSoC. Basically, it was to take a drink, discuss a bit about distutils2, our respective tasks and general feelings, and to put a face on a pseudonym. I’d really enjoyed this time, because Éric knows a lot of things about mercurial and python good practices, and I’m eager to learn about those. So, we have discussed about things, have not wrote so much code, but have some things to propose so far, about documentation, and I also provides here some bribes of conversations we had.

## Documentation

While writing the PyPI simple index crawler documentation, I realized that we miss some structure, or how-to about the documentation. Yep, you read well. We lack documentation on how to make documentation. Heh. We’re missing some rules to follow, and this lead to a not-so-structured final documentation. We probably target three type of publics, and we can split the documentation regarding those:

- Packagers who want to distribute their softwares.
- End users who need to understand how to use end user commands, like the installer/uninstaller
- packaging coders who use distutils2, as a base for building a package manager.

We also need to discuss about a pattern to follow while writing documentation. How many parts do we need ? Where to put the API description ? etc. That’s maybe seems to be not so important, but I guess the readers would appreciate to have the same structure all along distutils2 documentation.

## Mercurial

I’m really not a mercurial power user. I use it on daily basis, but I lack of basic knowledge about it. Big thanks Éric for sharing yours with me, you’re of a great help. We have talked about some mercurial extensions that seems to make the life simpler, while used the right way. I’ve not used them so far, so consider this as a personal note.

- hg histedit, to edit the history
- hg crecord, to select the changes to commit

We have spent some time to review a merge I made sunday, to re-merge it, and commit the changes as a new changeset. Awesome. These things make me say I need to read the hg book, and will do as soon as I got some spare time: mercurial seems to be simply great. So … Great. I’m a powerful merger now !

## On using tools

Because we also are hackers, we have shared a bit our ways to code, the tools we use, etc. Both of us were using vim, and I’ve discovered vimdiff and hgtk, which will completely change the way I navigate into the mercurial history. We aren’t “power users”, so we have learned from each other about vim tips. You can find my dotfiles on github, if it could help. They’re not perfect, and not intended to be, because changing all the time, as I learn. Don’t hesitate to have a look, and to propose enhancements if you have !

## On being pythonic

My background as an old Java user disserves me so far, as the paradigms are not the same while coding in python. Hard to find the more pythonic way to do, and sometimes hard to unlearn my way to think about software engineering. Well, it seems that the only solution is to read code, and to re-read import this from times to times ! Coding like a pythonista seems to be a must-read, so, I know what to do.

## Conclusion

It was really great. Next time, we’ll need to focus a bit more on distutils2, and to have a bullet list of things to do, but days like this one are opportunities to catch ! We’ll probably do another sprint in a few weeks, stay tuned !