Cleaning up PyBlosxom

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

I've been following Cheesecake development with the hope that it'd be a tool that would help me fix PyBlosxom's shortcomings, make it easier for people to use, and make it easier for people to develop. It has certainly been all that and more.

I've been going through the various kwalitee measures that Cheesecake does to understand them and I've been making adjustments to PyBlosxom's source code and project infrastructure. I've made a lot of changes so far, discovered some latent bugs and code problems, documented undocumented code, fixed existing documentation, and started writing tests.

It's a huge effort, but it's a lot easier with tools like Cheesecake, nose, pylint, and coverage. Additionally, the blog entries at AgileTesting and articles at Living in an Ivory Basement have been helpful. Also, I've been shamelessly copying the infrastructure of the Cheesecake project. That's made it a lot easier to get my head around various bits.

At the moment, everything is local. I'd start checking things in but SVN at SF is really flakey (though the SF site status page doesn't mention any SVN issues).

I see the next version of PyBlosxom having some bug fixes and new features, but generally it's going to be a release focusing on cleaning up the codebase and the infrastructure.

Out of curiosity, while I'm in the process of cleaning up the codebase is it interesting to anyone for me to write up more detailed blog entries covering up how and what I'm doing? It might help by giving outlining a gameplan for cleaning up other Python-based projects. If that's something you're interested in, toss a comment on the blog or email me at willkg at bluesock dot org.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.