Richard Jones' Log

Very busy at work (mostly setting up the ZEO / load-balancing, and fixing bugs in the conferences).

Looks like there's going to be another Ludum Dare 48 hour comp in the near future. W00t.

Stuff to read in the near future: Aristotle's Poetics and an introduction to the Wuxia genre. When I find time, that is. I usually only find time to read in the evening, in bed, winding down from the day. Where's my damn electronic paper with WiFi? Same place as the jetpack, I suppose.

At the moment I'm working on scripts that manage our development / testing / demo / production Zope environments. In a nutshell, they:

• Install / update code from CVS - either home-grown or 3rd-party managed by vendor_import.py - into dated directories,
• Install / update Zope and/or ZEO servers configured to use the above code, with options to roll back to previous dated installs when updates go awry,
• Manage Python Director sitting in front of the ZEO clients to manage balancing and seamless upgrades.

The dated installs, ZEO and pydirector stuff is the main thrust of my currentl development. I'm almost there... just getting the pydirector stuff going.

The pydirector web page lies - it requires Twisted. Until now, our CVS has been Twisted-free. I'm not saying that Twisted's evil or anything, just that our CVS repository just doubled in size. Ouch. Twisted, at 95Mb, takes up as much space as the next two biggest modules - PostgreSQL and Python (and we have revisions of those in there). Maybe I should've imported just the code version, and not the +docs version (which I included in case I need them one day). 95Mb of CVS space just so I can load-balance Zope ZEO clients.

Update:ah screw it, the docs die.

(I'll probably release this code when I'm done. The source installing stuff might not be of interest, but the Zope/ZEO/pydirector installing and management stuff might be...)

It's starting to kinda bug me...

No container provided. Access to 'ws_url' of None, acquired through (Nicer Item workspace at 0x43cc36b0), denied.

Sigh. I'll find the culprit, eventually. After at least an hour, maybe two, of poking down into depths of Zope that no man was ever intended to.

15 minutes later ... well, that was quick. I decided to blame a recurring problem we're having with ComputedAttributes, and it turns out it was a good guess. I'm slowly removing all use of them, as they interact poorly with recent Zopes.