Reporting UI bugs to upstream

It’s kind of funny how easily I sometimes attribute frustrating properties of the software that I am using to the developers of the application itself.

If a piece of software is frustrating to use, especially if most of the problems seem like “Someone made this on purpose just to annoy me, I mean developers can’t be that stupid.” – I am much less likely to report any bugs. Why – they will probably just ignore it.

Bzr is a prime example of that, whenever I encounter problems with bzr, response from the community is “You are thinking wrong, if you were thinking right – it would work.”, so next time I make it crash/hickup/create a mess I just assume that they probably know it, and are not doing anything about it so why waste my time and why waste their time.

Not a good thing to do, really.

How to package a Zope3 application tarball in 3 easy steps

Assumptions:

• You don’t have root/admin account on the system.
• You are a clueless Zope3 newbie.

Step 1: Install zc.buildout, zopeproject and zc.sourcerelease.

• download http://svn.colorstudy.com/virtualenv/trunk/virtualenv.py
• $ python2.4 virtalenv.py my_sandbox
• $ cd my_sandbox
• $ bin/easy_install zc.sourcerelease zc.buildout zopeproject

Step 2: Create a Zope3 application.

I do the –no-buildout thing because I want to modify the default buildout.cfg to use KGS before building the thing.

• $ bin/zopeproject zcontact --no-buildout

Enter user (Name of an initial administrator user): manager
Enter passwd (Password for the initial administrator user): zcontact
Enter eggs_dir (Location where zc.buildout will look for and place packages)
  ['/home/ignas/buildout-eggs']: eggs

• now, to fix the buildout.cfg so it would not use site-packages from your system to get Improved Reliability™, add

[virtualpython]
recipe = tl.buildout_virtual_python
headers = true
executable-name = vp

• make [buildout] section look like this:

[buildout]
index = http://download.zope.org/zope3.4
develop = .
parts = virtualpython app test
newest = false
eggs-directory = eggs

• and finally add this line to both [test] and [app] blocks:

python = virtualpython

Step 3: Package the thing.

• $ bin/buildout-source-release file:///home/ignas/src/zcontact buildout.cfg

You’ll get a zcontact.tgz in the current directory. Your users can
download it, extract and run python2.4 install.py to get a working
application.

A very nice talk by Paul Krugman

An in-depth analysis  of the United States Sub-Prime mortgage crisis for the layman: