PVS update

It’s been quiet here lately, but only because I’m busy with PVS – my SoC project. ;-) PVS stands for Patch Verification System and I’m building it to support patch review process for CPython. There’s not much time left before the end of SoC 2007, so I won’t tell you the whole story now. Instead, I will share with you few insights about development process and tools I’ve used. OK, here we go.

Sometimes Trac is an overkill. Text files in reST format are often more than enough. You also get a bonus by keeping all your project-related stuff (tests, documentation, todos) in one place (i.e. not scattered among repository, wiki and bugs manager).

I’m using two ORMs inside PVS: Elixir+SQLAlchemy and Django ORM. Both work great and saved me a lot of tedious work. I like the way SQLAlchemy handles references to other tables, although its select syntax is slightly weird (although surely powerful). Django ORM may not be as functional as SQLAlchemy, but its main advantage is its good integration with the rest of the framework. Tweaking the admin views is both pleasant and addictive (something like customizing desktop settings of your new Ubuntu install ;-). You’ve been warned.

Did I mention that both ORMs work on the same database without any problems at all? A big thanks to both libraries’ authors for not using magic tables/fields or strange implicit conventions.

Duplicating the whole source checkout tree of a project of CPython size (about 100Mb in almost 12.000 files) is quite expensive, as I soon realized (better sooner than later). Hopefully I don’t have to do this – patch has –dry-run option and subversion client supports revert operation. This combination has truly saved me. :-)

Twill rocks. I written a patch reporter for Roundup in less than half an hour. Thanks Titus!

Python decorators are not used often, but applied carefully can be very powerful. In PVS I defined daemonized decorator which makes decorated function execute in the background as a separate process. It also creates a PID file in a configured directory (like /var/run/pvs/), so you can easily manage the daemon (e.g. send signals to it).

After initially using Subversion I recently switched to Bazaar, mostly for its ability to work offline. It’s been working fine so far. Because I’m working alone I didn’t have occasion to use its merging capabilities, so can’t really comment on those. When it comes to speed, it’s visibly faster than Subversion, mostly because it doesn’t have to process anything over the wire. Making a backup and sharing is easier – just archive the branch directory and you’re done. svn2bzr worked without problems, so if you’re a Subversion user – give Bazaar a try.

There are functions which I use over and over again in different Python applications that I write. Simple ones like read_file_contents/write_file_contents and more complicated beasts like daemonize or run_command. Those get copy&pasted between code repositories, which isn’t really DRY. Yeah, I could clean them up and put mk-utils package on PyPI, but I’m too lazy and this is a stupid idea anyway. A central repository of those functions and a simple way to cherry-pick – now that would make my day. Hey, why do we need whole libraries anyway? ;-)

And finally: grab the code. :-)