Thoughts on Google Summer of Code 2008 - part 1

In just a few days, Google will make some announcements that will please many hundreds of students and disappoint even more. I think we should all focus on the positive side when the announcements are made. It is, after all, a fantastic thing that a company is spending millions of dollars so that some students get the chance to program on Open Source software as a summer job.

Just think of it. Who could have predicted, just five years ago, that a company would spend that kind of money on students who would work on someone else's project?

This is amazing - and many are now taking it for granted.

I find it great that the Python Software Foundation is an organization that can mentor SoC students. With the excellent supporting work of James Tauber as coordinator, many promising students are going to be paired with a mentor, hopefully leading to great projects to be completed this summer.

I have seen some grumblings on some SoC related lists that have made me thought about some of the "problems" I have seen. Note that these are very minor compared with the strong positive points. I will be discussing those in part 2, after the official announcements are made.

• Because the PSF is an umbrella organization, most students work on different projects, unrelated with each other. As a result, they tend to have limited interactions with the greater Python community. I think there should be a "meeting place" where all the students would meet - perhaps a mailing list to which they have all to contribute once a week, sharing their progress, etc.
• Not enough positive publicity is given to "successful students", i.e. those that continue to contribute to the Python community after the summer is over. For Crunchy, it has been one success (Johannes Woolard) out of a total of 3 students over the past 2 years. I don't know of many other success stories from other projects ... Alex Holkner comes to mind ... but I feel I should know more names of successful students. (I know there's another Alex or Alessandro who has contributed to the Python core and was involved with GHOP....)
  
• With the exception of a few people like James Tauber and Titus Brown with whom I have had a few email exchanges, I do not feel that as a past/potential mentor I am as much part of a community as I feel should be the case. There is a mentor discussion list, but it does not seem to be the kind of place to generate community building discussions.
  

In terms of projects submitted, I would describe them to belong in the following categories:

1. Contributions to the "standard" core (cpython code, or standard library)

2 a. Contributions to "non-standard core" (e.g. Jython, PyPy, TinyPy?)
2 b. Contributions to 3rd party libraries (e.g. Numpy, Pygame)
2 c. Contributions to major projects whose end users have to use Python (e.g. SAGE)
2 d. Contributions to projects that can be used to teach Python [Crunchy, of course ;-), but there are others ... that will be for part 2]

3 a. Contributions that propose some new "standards" for Python programmers, never discussed before in the Python community.
3 b. Projects that happen to be written in Python, but whose end users are not exposed (or minimally exposed) to Python.
3 c. Projects that are not written in Python, that may or may not be usable in all OS, and that aren't more useful to Python programmers than they would be to people using other languages.
3 d. et cetera

Assuming that all projects are well-thought of (which is not always the case), I feel that:

• Projects in category 1 deserve to be fully supported. The Python community need more capable people contributing to the core to prevent burnout for the current contributors. Perhaps, in a few years, after working some more on Crunchy, I'll feel capable of joining that group and contributing effectively (and have the time to do so).
• Projects in categories 2 a-d are worthy of support. There are of course more such projects submitted than can possibly be supported, so some difficult choices had to be made. (Kudos to James for guiding this process.) Many people are going to be disappointed, but this was unavoidable.
  
• Projects in categories 3 a-d are a puzzle to me. I don't understand their appeal for the PSF (and I know I am not the only one), but it seems that very few people are willing to take a public stance on this and debate the issue. Note that this comment is made as an observation on the discussions that took place so far and does not necessarily reflect on any decision that has been made.
  

This is it for the negative comments. I can't wait for the announcements from Google to focus entirely on the more positive side.

Firefox 3b5: the pain of using the bleeding edge

After seeing so many positive reviews of the upcoming Firefox 3, I decided to try the latest beta (5) version. It seems indeed to be fast when dealing with complex javascript. While there are a few features I am not too keen about [1], I liked the extra speed (and the reduced RAM usage) so much that I have been using it almost exclusively. That is until now, since I can't rely on it to test Crunchy. Update: this is no longer true, thanks to a reader's comment. The fix was to move the onblur event to the file input, indicated by HERE.

To load a local html file [2] into Crunchy, a two-step process has to be used due to normal javascript security:

<form name="browser_local"
onblur="document.submit_local.url.value =
    document.browser_local.filename.value">
<input name="filename"  type="file" HERE >
</form>

<form action="/local" method="get" name="submit_local">
 <input name="url" type="hidden">
 <input class="crunchy" type="submit">
        value="Load local html tutorial" />
</form>

The first form allows to browse the local drive for a particular file. The second one sends the chosen file's path to the browser as an argument to the "/local" action, something like /local?url=file_path. Unfortunately, when using Firefox 3 beta 5, no argument is passed and we get /local?url= instead. And of course no file can be loaded.

This file browser feature is not something I test regularly when working on Crunchy, nor is it something that can be tested via standard Python unit tests. [3] When I noticed the new bug, it never crossed my mind that this could be a "new Firefox feature" and thought it was something I had broken in Crunchy's code. [4] It was only after I tried a few old releases of Crunchy (to figure out when "I" broke the code) that I figured out that the problem was not due to anything I wrote.

I have not been able to find any note about this new behavior of Firefox. Since this is still a beta, I guess I'll have to wait until the final Firefox 3 release to figure out if I need to change the way I load files. [5]

====
[1] One change I don't like is the rather gaudy auto-suggest list when typing a url.

[2] The same method is used to load reStructuredText files and others.

[3] I really need to investigate twill for this.

[4] One more reason to have a complete unit test coverage. Since I don't, I automatically assumed it was something I had done.

[5] If anyone has any lead as to how to do so reliably in Firefox 3b5 as well as with other browsers, I'd be keen to hear about it.

Shell meme

I'm responding to peer pressure. I pretty much only use the shell for one thing and rarely restart it...

andre$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
322 python
76 cd
26 ls
11 grep
8 pwd
8 find
5 sudo
3 rm
3 def
2 svn