One line bio
<olb> American; 35; based near Boston, Massachusetts; developer: SUMO; developer: PyBlosxom; developer: MediaGoblin; developer: Miro; developer: Miro Community; curator: Python Miro Community; employed: Mozilla; working on second children's book; mostly decent guy; busy. </olb>

Donate $5 for a couple of cups of coffee to water the FLOSS plants.

Search this site

Tags

48hfp blog bluesock books bugzilla communication coworking debian dent dev elasticsearch elasticutils emacs fail firstworldproblems floss food fun gentoo ghop gnome gnu hardware herd java kids latex life lyntin mediagoblin miro mirocommunity money movies mozilla muds music needhelp office pcf phil photos pig plants plugins pmc pyblosxom pycon pycon2011 pygotham python pyvideo redhat richard socialmedia software sumo tube ubuntu universalsubtitles vacation vagrant vim web webdev wiki work workingfromhomeisawesome workshop world xml

Categories
/ [atom] (888)
  apartment/ [atom] (3)
  content/ [atom] (255)
    books/ [atom] (1)
  debian/ [atom] (19)
  dents/ [atom] (71)
  dev/ [atom] (216)
    elasticutils/ [atom] (1)
    lyntin/ [atom] (32)
    pyblosxom/ [atom] (111)
      contrib/ [atom] (5)
      plugins/ [atom] (14)
      tips/ [atom] (4)
    python/ [atom] (16)
    stringbean/ [atom] (8)
    web/ [atom] (3)
  essays/ [atom] (13)
  gentoo/ [atom] (4)
  gmg/ [atom] (1)
  gnome/ [atom] (4)
  herd/ [atom] (1)
  miro/ [atom] (250)
    needhelp/ [atom] (1)
  mozilla/ [atom] (2)
  muds/ [atom] (4)
  nokia770/ [atom] (3)
  pig/ [atom] (2)
  pmc/ [atom] (22)
  pyvideo/ [atom] (3)
  site/ [atom] (13)
  zaurus/ [atom] (2)

Archives
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
1999

Books I'm reading
2011/05::2011/05 - Done
Shroud for a Nightingale, by P.D. James

2011/04::2011/04 - Done
Unnatural Causes, by P.D. James

2011/03::2011/03 - Done
A Mind to Murder, by P.D. James

2011/02::2011/02 - Done
Cover Her Face, by P.D. James

2011/01::2011/01 - Done
The Murder Room, by P.D. James

more...

Hosted by
bluesock.org

Will's blog

purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Miro, PyBlosxom, Python, GNU/Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

[ home | blog home | recent activity ]

Mon, 30 Jan 2012

Migration to Trac: How some small projects balloon into massive projects when you have good intentions and you're not paying attention

Since around July, I've been working on migrating MediaGoblin from Redmine hosted on the Foocorp servers to Trac hosted on our server. The project looked small enough initially, but then suffered from a series of complications that turned the small project into a big project that took about 6 months and involved writing about 5000 lines of code. Pretty crazy. I don't even want to estimate how many hours I spent on it. Oy.

It wasn't a terrible project, though. Parts of it were educational. I'd written scrapers in Java and Perl a long time ago, but hadn't written anything with Python, lxml, and cssselect [1]. I read through parts of Trac and Trac's db schema. I also read through Trac plugin code.

The best part about it is that it's done now. This gives the GNU MediaGoblin project more autonomy and also more flexibility for adjusting the project to meet their specific needs. That's good stuff---time for cake!

[1] cssselect is amazing. Many thanks to Asheesh for telling me what I was doing was silly and to use cssselect since it's way easier to use. As a side note, Asheesh is teaching Web scraping: Reliably and efficiently pull data from pages that don't expect it at PyCon 2012. If you get the advice I got, it'll be awesome.

[ tags: dev, mediagoblin, python | category: /gmg | Permalink | View/Add Comments: 0 ]

pyblosxom::1.5-dev git-master

Will's Blog by William Kahn-Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.