Last Wednesday, we met at the Montréal office of Google to sprint on the Python packaging system. This is our second sprint since we came back from vacation and it went really well with a total of 12 sprinters:
- Rajiv Abraham
- Éric Araujo (remotely from Paris)
- Pior Bastida
- Nicolas Cadou
- Yannick Gingras
- Amos Latteier
- Mathieu Leduc-Hamel
- Derek McTavish Mounce
- Mathieu Perreault
- Pierre Phaneuf (host from Google)
- Antoine Reversat
- Alexandre Vassalotti
Mathieu Leduc-Hamel launched the sprint with a "state of the packaging" presentation then everyone got busy pairing and getting setup. We had enough veterans to help all the new comer to get started and, in no time, everyone was hacking at full speed. We're also really happy that Éric was able to stay up late and to help us with technical questions on the internals of the packaging system.
Most sprinters decided to refresh their mind by writing some unit test. This was great because the we were soon confronted with obscure failures on some machines while most of the crew had fully passing suites. Mathieu Perreault was able to hunt down a failure that was dependant on the hostname of the machine and Nicolas uncovered a bad fixture that would make later tests fail.
Rajiv, who started with Python only a few weeks ago and who also was our only Windows user, paired with Alexandre and resolved several Windows specific tests. Amos wrote several new tests, bringing version.py to complete test coverage in the process while I, Yannick, helped him by resolving a bug in the test runner that would make it report inaccurate coverage on a few core files.
Our documentation team was also hard at work with Derek improving the existing prose and Pior and Antoine pairing to produce a new example package that would use more the of advanced features of distutils2.
In addition to hosting the sprint, Google supported us with pizza, snacks, and refreshments. We were a bit disappointed to learn that the M&M dispenser was out of order but I have to admit that cashews and dried mangos were a more than fair compensation. WingWare also supported our sprinting effort by providing all sprinters with a full 3-OS license for WingIDE.
Overall, over 200 lines were changed across 58 files, not a lot a code in absolute terms but considering the amount of coaching and of debugging that took place, this was one of our best sprint. The packaging core team did not find anything too controversial in our code and it just got merged into Tarek's repository. We're aiming for another sprint around mid-October. Stay tuned for the announcement.
[caption id="attachment_978" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Yannick explains how to measure the test coverage"]
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