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	<title>Christoph's Blog</title>
	<link>http://blog.workaround.org</link>
	<description>Rants, discoveries and subtleties that my children should never learn about</description>
	<pubDate>Sat, 19 Jul 2008 18:33:44 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>setuptools versioning - wtf?</title>
		<link>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/07/19/setuptools-versioning-wtf/</link>
		<comments>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/07/19/setuptools-versioning-wtf/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 19 Jul 2008 18:31:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Chris</dc:creator>
		
		<category>Pylons</category>

		<category>Programming</category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.workaround.org/2008/07/19/setuptools-versioning-wtf/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Nowadays I&#8217;m taking Debian&#8217;s APT software management system pretty much for granted. It probably represents the most advanced and powerful system. So I&#8217;m not instantly turned away if I find other systems that don&#8217;t work as well. Observing how Windows users struggle with getting the 50 different installed pieces of software to update that all [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Nowadays I&#8217;m taking Debian&#8217;s APT software management system pretty much for granted. It probably represents the most advanced and powerful system. So I&#8217;m not instantly turned away if I find other systems that don&#8217;t work as well. Observing how Windows users struggle with getting the 50 different installed pieces of software to update that all use their own mechanisms thus wasting computing time and hard disk space while often getting annoyed by &#8220;Do you want to update now?&#8221; requests or sudden reboots is fun.</p>
<p>Anyway, as an addicted Python programmer I obviously had to deal with the &#8220;setuptools&#8221; already. It&#8217;s Python&#8217;s pendant to Perl&#8217;s CPAN. It can download Python modules with certain versions, satisfy dependencies automatically etc. The central place for Python modules is the <a href="http://pypi.python.org/">Python Package Index (PyPi)</a>. Obviously I usually wouldn&#8217;t need to deal with the setuptools often because Debian already provides properly packages Python modules but sometimes it&#8217;s nice to deploy applications within a <i>virtualenv</i> environment (similar to a chroot with its own set of module versions not conflicting with other versions installed on the system). Still I think that setuptools is pretty pathetic.</p>
<ul>
<li>You can&#8217;t uninstall modules properly. This is a no-go - we aren&#8217;t in the Windows 95 ages any more.</li>
<li>PyPi often just links to the developers&#8217; home pages which tend to go offline when you urgently need to deploy an application and can&#8217;t get a certain version downloaded. (Pylons has kindly collected the needed eggs on their download page for that case.)</li>
<li>Sometimes certain versions are requested that are no longer available on PyPi that have been released just weeks ago.</li>
<li>Outside of the virtualenv you&#8217;d have to install modules system-wide which collides with your software management like APT (unless you have an operating system like Windows that doesn&#8217;t care anyway).</li>
</ul>
<p>But the single most pathetic detail about setuptools is their versioning. Gustavo Noronha Silva pointed me to /usr/share/pyshared/pkg_resources.py which contained an explanation of how version numbers are compared:</p>
<blockquote><p>
Strings like &#8220;a&#8221;, &#8220;b&#8221;, &#8220;c&#8221;, &#8220;alpha&#8221;, &#8220;beta&#8221;, &#8220;candidate&#8221; and so on (that come before &#8220;final&#8221; alphabetically) are assumed to be pre-release versions, so that the version &#8220;2.4&#8243; is considered newer than &#8220;2.4a1&#8243;.</p>
<p>Finally, to handle miscellaneous cases, the strings &#8220;pre&#8221;, &#8220;preview&#8221;, and &#8220;rc&#8221; are treated as if they were &#8220;c&#8221;, i.e. as though they were release candidates, and therefore are not as new as a version string that does not contain them.
</p></blockquote>
<p>So the sorting goes something like a, b, c, pre, preview, rc, alpha, beta, candidate, final. And &#8220;2.4&#8243; is newer than &#8220;2.4a1&#8243; but not newer than &#8220;2.4f1&#8243;? Please people, lay off the drugs. I feel tempted to send that to <a href="http://thedailywtf.com/">The daily wtf</a>.</p>
<p>I thought that setuptools and virtualenv is a good combination if a certain Python module is not yet available in Debian. But I think I&#8217;d rather spend 30 minutes to create a proper Debian package with a <a href="http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version">real version numbering system</a> instead of wasting my time with these antics.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t get me wrong. I appreciate the intention of setuptools and easy_install. But the world needs a 2.0 of this work. From what I heard hardly anyone understands setuptools well enough to provide something better. Bummer.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Mercurial repositories moved to hg.workaround.org</title>
		<link>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/07/09/mercurial-repositories-moved-to-hgworkaroundorg/</link>
		<comments>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/07/09/mercurial-repositories-moved-to-hgworkaroundorg/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:14:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Chris</dc:creator>
		
		<category>Open-Source</category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.workaround.org/2008/07/09/mercurial-repositories-moved-to-hgworkaroundorg/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I have finally found the time to aggregate the chaotic amount of my mighty open-source Mercurial works into http://hg.workaround.org
So if you are missing a repository on other URLs at workaround.org it&#8217;s worth a try to see if it&#8217;s now there. 

]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I have finally found the time to aggregate the chaotic amount of my mighty open-source Mercurial works into http://hg.workaround.org</p>
<p>So if you are missing a repository on other URLs at workaround.org it&#8217;s worth a try to see if it&#8217;s now there. <img src='http://blog.workaround.org/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley' />
</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/07/09/mercurial-repositories-moved-to-hgworkaroundorg/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
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		<item>
		<title>Beta-version of debexpo is out</title>
		<link>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/07/09/beta-version-of-debexpo-is-out/</link>
		<comments>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/07/09/beta-version-of-debexpo-is-out/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:13:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Chris</dc:creator>
		
		<category>debexpo</category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.workaround.org/2008/07/09/beta-version-of-debexpo-is-out/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m actually enjoying the Google Summer of Code where I offered to mentor the &#8220;debexpo&#8221; project (a Debian package repository software that is supposed to replace my old crappy code on mentors.debian.net as well as work as an alternative for PPA, REVU and other tools like that). Jonny has really exceeded my expectations. Now that [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;m actually enjoying the Google Summer of Code where I offered to mentor the &#8220;debexpo&#8221; project (a Debian package repository software that is supposed to replace my old crappy code on mentors.debian.net as well as work as an alternative for PPA, REVU and other tools like that). Jonny has really exceeded my expectations. Now that roughly half of the time to complete the project is up Jonny Lamb (the student actually doing the coding) has presented a usable beta version. See his blog posting at http://jonnylamb.com/2008/07/09/debexpo/ and feel free to help testing and make suggestions.
</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Our GSoC project has been accepted - yahoo! :)</title>
		<link>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/04/21/our-gsoc-project-has-been-accepted-yahoo/</link>
		<comments>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/04/21/our-gsoc-project-has-been-accepted-yahoo/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:40:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Chris</dc:creator>
		
		<category>Debian</category>

		<category>Pylons</category>

		<category>debexpo</category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.workaround.org/2008/04/21/our-gsoc-project-has-been-accepted-yahoo/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This is pretty exciting. I have never bothered about Google&#8217;s Summer of Code and have literally been forced (curse you, Kumar) to propose my project I&#8217;m working on.
And in the end I have a promising student and Google accepted our proposal. Watching #gsoc while everybody was waiting whether they got accepted caused more traffic than [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This is pretty exciting. I have never bothered about Google&#8217;s Summer of Code and have literally been forced (curse you, Kumar) to propose my <a title="project" href="http://code.google.com/soc/2008/debian/appinfo.html?csaid=D4B754E7C110F53D">project</a> I&#8217;m working on.</p>
<p>And in the end I have a promising student and Google accepted our proposal. Watching #gsoc while everybody was waiting whether they got accepted caused more traffic than #freenode-newyears. Looking forward to days and nights of my spare time vanish for a fancy T-shirt. <img src='http://blog.workaround.org/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley' />  Nah, seriously. A lot of people have asked for an easy-to-handle web-enabled package repository. It will surely be very helpful as a clean and featureful basis for mentors.debian.net as well as the replacement for PPAs and REVU. And this will be my first large open-source Pylons project, too. I&#8217;m excited.
</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/04/21/our-gsoc-project-has-been-accepted-yahoo/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>pgadmin3 - now it&#8217;s getting personal</title>
		<link>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/02/18/pgadmin3-now-its-getting-personal/</link>
		<comments>http://blog.workaround.org/2008/02/18/pgadmin3-now-its-getting-personal/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:39:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Chris</dc:creator>
		
		<category>Work</category>

		<category>Debian</category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://blog.workaround.org/2008/02/18/pgadmin3-now-its-getting-personal/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I really don&#8217;t mind if Debian lags behind with package versions. And I&#8217;ve gotten used to running an ancient version of &#8220;pgadmin3&#8243; (the GUI client for PostgreSQL). But now that I upgraded a few pgsql servers from 8.2 to 8.3 and started pgadmin3 I was surprised - in a not at all fun way. Several [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I really don&#8217;t mind if Debian lags behind with package versions. And I&#8217;ve gotten used to running an ancient version of &#8220;pgadmin3&#8243; (the GUI client for PostgreSQL). But now that I upgraded a few pgsql servers from 8.2 to 8.3 and started pgadmin3 I was surprised - in a not at all fun way. Several warnings were displayed. Googling a little I found the cause:</p>
<p><strong>&#8220;pgAdmin 1.6.x doesn&#8217;t support PostgreSQL 8.3.x. Upgrade to 1.8&#8243;</strong></p>
<p>How funny. pgadmin3 in Debian depends on wxwidgets and apparently the current version of wxwidgets didn&#8217;t make it into Sid for stability reasons or whatever. So now I&#8217;m running into trouble with PostgreSQL 8.3. Somehow I can&#8217;t laugh about that. Alright&#8230; downgrading to 8.2 again. Is that even possible? Okay, pg_dropcluster and get my backup tapes out.
</p>
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