Dreamwidth Development Training

Questions on bug 2277.

2013-06-17T15:46:12Z

Posted by: randomling

So I'm working on Bug 2277 - which is to add an additional option to the entry page to allow preview-with-cuts as well as regular preview.

I think this would be an awesome feature.

I have two beginner questions:

1. Obviously we're not hacking on the old entry page any more, so this would be a feature added to the new entry page. Am I even allowed to hack on the new entry page, or should I leave that to Fu?

2. What is the feature name for the new entry page? There's a wiki page on how to add beta features to your 'hack, but I couldn't find a list of beta features we currently have running and their backend names.

Thanks in advance, folks!

comments

Very basic scripts for newbies

2013-06-16T21:29:37Z

Posted by: ninetydegrees

I have two scripts I use all the time and which have saved me much grief and hair pulling. I was told there were worth sharing so here I am doing just that. :)

The first one just checks which branch you're on both in dw-free and nonfree (it's basically git branch with a bow):
( Read more... )

See? There's nothing particularly smart about this but I run it every time I start working on something.

The second one just checkouts develop for me on both branches and brings me back to /dw. Again nothing fancy about it but I find it very useful so maybe you will to:

( Read more... )

These go into ####-USERNAME/bin on your hack and are made executable with chmod ugo+x ~/bin/SCRIPTNAME

You can of course modify them to better fit your workflow or use Jeshyr's omnibus script instead. If you have interesting scripts, do share them in the comments please!

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Non-deterministic behaviour in bug 4980!?

2013-06-15T12:19:54Z

Posted by: jeshyr

OK my initial problem was that I looked at bug 4980 and thought "This'll be easy!", thus clearly jinxing all efforts to patch the thing...

ETA: The glorious Sophira just pointed out that I had mysteriously got 3 backgrounded copies of the xpost worker which had stuck around despite being run as foreground copies. This would quite possibly produce exactly the crazy behaviour described below, although I have no spoons to test until tomorrow... stay tuned.

ETA2: It's working now! Woot! Thank you Soph.

So I started out by setting up cross posts to DW, although I later switched the cross posts to LJ because it's easier to visibly distinguish "livejournal.com" and "rb.hack.dreamwidth.net" when I am tired. So my crossposts are going to LJ.

First searched for the relevant text - it shows up in en.dat with the key of "xpost.redirect.comment" so I grepped for that. It's only in two files:
1. cgi-bin/DW/XPostAccounts.pm has the code for the account settings page.
2. cgi-bin/DW/External/XPostProtocol.pm has the code for the crossposter.

Added a new key xpost.redirect.comment2 which has the value of:


xpost.redirect.comment2=<span style="font-size: smaller;">This entry was originally posted at <a href = "[[postlink]]">[[postlink]]</a>. Please comment there using <a href="[[siteroot]]/openid/">OpenID</a>.</span>

So now I need to alter the building of the footer string to point to the new key, and also alter the calls to LJ::Lang::ml to pass in a value for [[siteroot]]. Here is my diff at this point from 'git diff':

diff --git a/cgi-bin/DW/External/XPostProtocol.pm b/cgi-bin/DW/External/XPostProtocol.pm
index 1d9eda5..26d3941 100644
--- a/cgi-bin/DW/External/XPostProtocol.pm
+++ b/cgi-bin/DW/External/XPostProtocol.pm
@@ -105,18 +105,18 @@ sub create_footer {
             return $self->create_footer_text($entry, $custom_footer_template);
         } else {
             # did we disable comments on the local entry? tweak language string to match
-            my $footer_text_redirect_key = $local_nocomments ? 'xpost.redirect' : 'xpost.redirect.comment';
+            my $footer_text_redirect_key = $local_nocomments ? 'xpost.redirect' : 'xpost.redirect.comment2';
 
-            return "\n\n" . LJ::Lang::ml( $footer_text_redirect_key, { postlink => $entry->url } );
+            return "\n\n" . LJ::Lang::ml( $footer_text_redirect_key, { postlink => $entry->url, siteroot => $LJ::SITEROOT } );
         }
     } elsif ( ( $xpostfootprop eq "N" ) || ( ( $xpostfootprop eq "D" ) && ( ! $disabling_remote_comments ) )  ) {
         return "";
     } else {
         # fallthrough. shouldn't get here, but in case we do for
         # some crazy reason, let's assume the old behavior.
-        my $footer_text_redirect_key = $local_nocomments ? 'xpost.redirect' : 'xpost.redirect.comment';
+        my $footer_text_redirect_key = $local_nocomments ? 'xpost.redirect' : 'xpost.redirect.comment2';
 
-        return "\n\n" . LJ::Lang::ml( $footer_text_redirect_key, { postlink => $entry->url } );
+        return "\n\n" . LJ::Lang::ml( $footer_text_redirect_key, { postlink => $entry->url, siteroot => $LJ::SITEROOT } );
     }
 }
 
diff --git a/cgi-bin/DW/Setting/XPostAccounts.pm b/cgi-bin/DW/Setting/XPostAccounts.pm
index f2be76a..8652f67 100644
--- a/cgi-bin/DW/Setting/XPostAccounts.pm
+++ b/cgi-bin/DW/Setting/XPostAccounts.pm
@@ -181,7 +181,7 @@ sub option {
 
     my $baseurl = $LJ::SITEROOT;
     my $alttext = $class->ml('setting.xpost.option.footer.vars.comment_image.alt');
-    my $default_comment = $class->ml('xpost.redirect.comment', { postlink => "%%url%%" });
+    my $default_comment = $class->ml('xpost.redirect.comment2', { postlink => "%%url%%", siteroot => $LJ::SITEROOT });
     my $default_nocomments = $class->ml('xpost.redirect', { postlink => "%%url%%" });
 
     # the javascript.  we have to do some special magic to get the lengths

This works fine on the account settings othersites page, http://www.rb.hack.dreamwidth.net/manage/settings/?cat=othersites on my 'hack. It correctly displays the OpenID link in both preview locations and all is good.

Crossposting itself however is another story... the footer keeps showing up like this:


<span style="font-size: smaller;">This entry was originally posted at <a href="http://penguin.rb.hack.dreamwidth.net/9633.html">http://penguin.rb.hack.dreamwidth.net/9633.html</a>. Please comment there using <a href="/openid/">OpenID</a>.</span>

So it's got the new value from en.dat but the [[siteroot]] is being filled in with nothing at all. The two relevant lines, grabbed from the diff, are thus:


            my $footer_text_redirect_key = $local_nocomments ? 'xpost.redirect' : 'xpost.redirect.comment2';

            return "\n\n" . LJ::Lang::ml( $footer_text_redirect_key, { postlink => $entry->url, siteroot => $LJ::SITEROOT } );

(lines 108-110 from XPostProtocol.pm)

At this point things started getting weird.

This is my basic workflow:
edit files
upload files
update database (code from http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/wiki/index.php/Dev_Maintenance#dwdb_-_Updating_the_database)
start apache
make a post on my 'hack
mostly at this point the post shows up on LJ without me ever starting any workers, but a few times I had to manually execute ~/dw/bin/workers/xpost - suspect this is when LJ times out on the first attempt?? so check post, start worker if necessary, check post again.
kill apache
kill workers
rinse,repeat

(I realise, writing this, that the database updating is probably utterly superfluous at this point, but anyway.)

First I thought maybe $LJ::SITEROOT was magically undefined here, so I tried concatenating it with visible things just to make sure it existed. It does, unsurprisingly. One of the things I concatenated it with was a hyphen before and aft so line 110 had "-$LJ::SITEROOT-".

Sometimes it worked and I could see the output:


<span style="font-size: smaller;">This entry was originally posted at <a href="http://penguin.rb.hack.dreamwidth.net/10431.html">http://penguin.rb.hack.dreamwidth.net/10431.html</a>. Please comment there using <a href="-http://www.rb.hack.dreamwidth.net-/openid/">OpenID</a>.</span>

but other times the very same change would give me the original with just /openid/ for the URL. It was handy to put different characters there because I could tell for sure that it was the right code and the crossposting was using the most recent version of that line, except that it seems to be almost random.

One time I set up apache and the xpost worker and made two posts in a row and the first one showed up with hyphens and the URL and the second showed up blank - with NO code change at ALL in between.

Now somehow it's stuck with the hyphens, although the code for line 110 has spent an hour back with just the URL in that spot.

I tried declaring a 'my $sroot' variable at line 109 and putting what I wanted in there, then pointing line 110 to that but it didn't make any difference.

I tried moving the en.dat key to deadphrases and reloading with texttool and then putting it back and re-reloading.

I tried with and without xpost workers running.

I checked with vim on the hack directly that the code really is there. I checked with 'git diff' that the changes really have been made.

I tried logging into and out of the ssh session, closing my browser and my local copy of vim and the FTP client, although I have no idea why that'd help.

There is nothing relevant in the apache error logs.

I contemplated sacrificing my cat but he didn't want to cooperate.

I'm up past crosspost attempt 50 and I can't see any pattern to what's happening. It appears that which version of the footer shows up in my crossposts is pretty much non-deterministic between any version I tried in the past and just an empty string for the URL.

Is it possible I hosed my database thoroughly when I was working on the testing bug and running all the broken test suite over and over? If so, how would I tell? how would I fix it?

What else could it be?

The diff in the textarea way up above is still my current one and I still think it should work...

HALP!

r

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A bug that needs fixing

2013-06-15T03:49:12Z

Posted by: misskat

I can't guarantee this one will be easy, but I'd REALLY appreciate someone looking into Bug 5123: merged feeds are removed from subscription filters.

From the bug description: If a user has added a feed to a subscription filter, and it's merged with another feed, the merged feed doesn't stay on that filter.

For example:
The user is subscribed to foo_feed, and has foo_feed on a sub/reading filter. foo_feed is a duplicate of bar_feed. They are merged into bar_feed. Bar_feed is not added to the user's filter. If bar_feed is on a subscription filter, it remains there.

If anyone has time to look into this, I would very much appreciate it.

comments

Bug 4176 - bizarre broken behaviour

2013-06-13T13:12:58Z

Posted by: kaberett

Here is my pull request.

Here is the Bugzilla entry, plus the diff of the draft patch I am building on.

The idea is that we want to add a "User:" line to every support notification e-mail, indicating who was responsible for the activity prompting the notification.

fu pointed out that I need to:

remove the quotation marks around $show_name at line 1068
account for the possibility of $posterid==0 at line 1095

My code as currently in pull request 427 behaves as expected, and as desired except for the issue outlined in point 2.

Removing the quotation marks from line 1068 produces the behaviour that the name of the user who submitted the request is quoted in all subsequent notification e-mails.

this persists if quotation marks are added back in.
this persists if everything after username => is deleted and rewritten.
this behaviour does not persist if line 1095 is replaced with mapping to a static text string, e.g. username => "badgerbadger", and the change is then committed, but does persist if it is instead mapped to e.g. $posterid.
this behaviour does not persist if the entirety of any line which has ever contained $show_name (without quotation marks) is deleted or commented out.
supportlog in the database is recording the correct information; it's just not making it to e-mail, somehow.

Ideas, please? I am WAY out of my depth here.

comments

Help! I've broken my dreamhack!

2013-06-12T09:07:25Z

Posted by: purplecat

For a while my dreamhack has been throwing odd errors - e.g.,

file error - tropo-red.tt: not found at /dreamhack/home/8362-purplecat/dw/cgi-bin/DW/Template.pm line 365.\n, referer: http://user3.purplecat.hack.dreamwidth.net/

Today it was behaving very badly, with apache refusing to start and stop correctly, git throwing wierd errors when I tried to update develop and so on. I eventually realised I'd run out of space - deleted my back-up save of my old mercurial repositories and managed to get apache and git behaving again.

However, somewhere along the way I seem to have fubarred the database:


dh-purplecat@newhack:~/dw/bin/upgrading$ ./update-db.pl -r -p --innodb
Updating cluster: 0
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /dreamhack/home/8362-purplecat/dw/cgi-bin/DBI/Role.pm line 245.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /dreamhack/home/8362-purplecat/dw/cgi-bin/DBI/Role.pm line 245.

cluster: status
      0: ERROR: Can't connect to the database (clust#0), so I can't update it. (Access denied for user 'dh-purplecat'@'localhost' (using password: NO))

Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /dreamhack/home/8362-purplecat/dw/cgi-bin/DBI/Role.pm line 245.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /dreamhack/home/8362-purplecat/dw/cgi-bin/DBI/Role.pm line 245.
Couldn't get master handle for population. at ./update-db.pl line 212.

Any idea what I've done, or how I can fix it?

Or even why I ran out of space - that worries me a bit too.

comments

Basic Overview of Workflow

2013-05-28T19:43:22Z

Posted by: cadenzamuse

I had three questions that I got answered in IRC today, which I documented in my journal here: [http://cadenzamuse.dreamwidth.org/167277.html]

1: What does the basics of "doing dev work" look like, step-by-step? If I want to code something, what do I do?

2: When I'm done mucking around with my Dreamhack for the day, what do I do to clean up and shut down?

and

3, which is a more esoteric question: What does it mean that Perl is an "untyped" language?

comments

New to Git

2013-05-28T11:22:14Z

Posted by: liv

I have just started getting back into DW dev after a lonnnng hiatus. denise and kaberett encouraged me to post here linking to my write-up of the experience, particularly working with Git for the first time.

So here's general background about where I am with babydev stuff for DW, from my personal journal. And here's the detailed write-up of my first attempt at Git from my dev journal.

The personal one has a bunch of feels and reflections about DW's culture (and some irrelevant stuff, because I tend to babble and connect disparate things together). And the dev notes one was intended as really detailed notes for my own use; I hope it's vaguely meaningful to other people at least. There's a whole lot of detail about Git and about making preview images, because those were new to me, and very limited information about S2 and Bugzilla and Dreamhacks, because those aspects I was already familiar with from my previous volunteering stint.

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Babydev bait of the week: move some files around

2013-05-23T17:08:42Z

Posted by: kaberett

(Last time round's is still up for grabs, now with documentation in the wiki linked to from comments!)

Bug 3955 requires you to change some filenames, and move some files around. This would be a really good way to get used to working with the command line (and various other tools, including Git) without needing to Learn All The Languages At Once.

As ever, I and a bunch of other people are always hanging out in #dreamwidth and #dreamwidth-dev (the IRC channels) and are more than happy to talk you through this step-by-step.

comments

Free CodeSchool for a weekend

2013-05-19T00:50:27Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

If you're looking to brush up on Javascript, CSS, or HTML skills and you don't already have an account, CodeSchool is having a free weekend May 25-26th.

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My Exciting Week With Git

2013-05-14T19:47:38Z

Posted by: kaberett

I have just pushed what is hopefully the final version of my patch for Bug 5030.

As you can see from comments on that git page, it took quite a lot of editing for me to get it to the final point. This means I ended up running git commit several times (here's the handy wiki doc).

For tidiness' sake, fu wanted all of the commits in that branch merged into a single commit using git rebase.

So, because I ended up doing this several times (and forgetting in between times how I'd done it), here is Wot I Did:
( Read more... )

That is a thing that I did! And explained really badly. But at least now there is outline for asking further questions/putting it in the wiki?

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Bug 3459 - new styles categorization system (brainstorming + RFC)

2013-05-13T05:18:47Z

Posted by: momijizukamori

So, this is the gigantic project that's been kicking around my head the last few months, because I love our themes but right now, the organization is nooooot there. And I love organization. The full bugzilla listing has all the debates and links and what not, but I'm going to add the summary of UI implementation I ran by Denise below:

( quoted from Bugzilla )

Because the scope of this runs through Perl, MySQL, BML, and Javascript, today I sat down and wrote out a vague work-flow for how looking at themes by category in /customize should run, and how adding themes as an admin should run, so I have an idea of what I need to do.

( very rough, mind you )

I'd really appreciate feedback on if I missed any important stuff, logistics of the UI implementation, and how exactly we should store this information in the databases. Or even on the list of categories I have so far, though there will probably be a bigger, more official RFC when things get far enough.

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Babydev bait of the week: add sites to whitelist for embedding

2013-05-13T01:12:41Z

Posted by: kaberett

This is a threefer: if you can do it for bug 4970, you can also do it for 5011 and 4959!

Thoughts? Queries? Takers? ♥

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userpicmap2/3

2013-05-12T19:16:12Z

Posted by: purplecat

Can I ask what is the difference between the database tables userpicmap2 and userpicmap3 (and possibly userpicmap1 though I couldn't find that mentioned in the code on a quick grep). userpicmap3 seems to be the one most used and there are comments in the code that suggest userpicmap2 is just there for backwards compatibility. Is that correct?

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What else would you like to see in the wiki page on Version Control?

2013-05-09T01:21:37Z

Posted by: kaberett

Wiki page on Version Control.

Tonight I logged into my Dreamhack for the first time since September (there were over 700 commits that I was behind by, um), and randomling was an absolute sweetheart and held my hand through the process of (a) updating my Dreamhack and (b) submitting my first patch since, er, we migrated.

(... whereupon I promptly forgot everything I ever knew about updating language strings, and mark was very sweet about it...)

IN THE PROCESS, I ended up tweaking the wiki page a bit, to include things I ran up against and needed to check with other people.

What else would you like to see in there? Leave suggestions in comments and we can edit them in!

comments

More babydev bait!

2013-04-26T02:52:27Z

Posted by: kaberett

There's fairly detailed specification in comments on the bugzilla pages for each bug (the ones I'm linking to) unless otherwise stated. They involve varying levels of rummaging up to your elbows in the guts of the code but I can promise that we'll all be only to pleased to help :-)

One-line (or similar) fixes
( Read more... )

A bit more rummaging involved
I also came across a bunch of stuff that I thought "hmm, might be interesting". These are all well-structured and well-specified, and in most cases you've got something to crib off (in the sense that other bits of the codebase already display the desired behaviour, it's just a case of making sure This Bit does too).
( Read more... )

And last but not least, those outstanding from the last babydev bait post (for handwavey difficulty ratings, see the original post!).
( Read more... )

Enjoy! And please remember to ask for help. Or cheerleading. Or anything else you feel like. ♥

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jQuery tutorials for perl programmers

2013-04-22T18:07:37Z

Posted by: pauamma

http://savage.net.au/jQuery-tutorials.html

I haven't read them yet, and can't vouch for their usefulness, or the knowledge of perl they require. (I suspect YMMV for both, as always.)

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where in the code is carmen sandiego

2013-04-22T03:09:44Z

Posted by: denise

in preparation for producing a "where in the hell does that bit of code live?" type document: what's the stuff that you've had a hell of a time finding in the code, either recently or when you first got started?

like, I always have to go searching for where the heck the control strip is generated from (answer: cgi-bin/LJ/Web.pm) and I usually lose a ton of the widgets. that kind of thing!

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[more babydev bait forthcoming!]

2013-04-22T02:41:54Z

Posted by: kaberett

Because the last one was so popular -- next weekend (or maybe before!) I'll be having a rummage through recent bugs and putting together a list of babydev bait!

This is your advance warning :-) Things that you could do now to make it easier to hit the ground running when the list comes are:

get yourself set up with a Dreamhack!
set up a Bugzilla account, so you can stake your claim on the bug(s) you've decided to tackle.
read the DW devs' pep talk and the list of things real dreamwidth programmers do :-)

If you've got any special requests for areas of the site, or types of code, LMK in comments and I'll see what I can dig out - otherwise I'll try to provide a fair range, though I know nerthing about styles so I'm likely to be of limited use in picking out useful ones of those for you!

In the meantime, it's worth checking out the previous list, put together by denise; some have been taken, but a lot are still marked Unassigned (no-one's said YEP I WANNA DO THAT), and I'm pretty sure that fu wouldn't mind letting you take over the ones she's claimed ;)

If you want help with any of the above, you can ask in comments here OR you can come and find us in IRC (we're very friendly! I hung out there for a good six months before I dared begin to think about code) OR you can make a new post or, you know, pretty much any other way you can think of asking for help that doesn't actually involve smoke signals from the fire of the machines the site runs on. ;)

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Babydev bait!

2013-04-20T23:30:18Z

Posted by: kaberett

Discussion in IRC resulted in a bug about making support board more accessible for colourblind volunteers.

It's a fix that basically involves tweaking some CSS. The hard bit is probably going to be tracking the code down, but misskat should be able to tell you where to find it, but so should many other people in IRC.

Any takers? :-)

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New vid of 'Git For Ages 4 And Up'

2013-04-13T13:54:58Z

Posted by: ninetydegrees

A while ago, Denise mentioned Michael Schwern's awesome 'Git For Ages 4 And Up' talk. So far you could only see the 2010 OSCON vid of it but there's a new one from 2013 linux.conf.au: http://youtu.be/1ffBJ4sVUb4. If you've already seen the 2010 vid you'll see that Michael Schwern has perfected his talk over the years and it's easier and clearer to understand now -- at least for the basics. The vid is also better quality so if you need a refresher or a link for fellow volunteers or co-workers this might be a good one. :)

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Identifying community administrators in jquery.postform.js

2013-03-27T18:25:28Z

Posted by: purplecat

I've been adding a stickies module to the entry post and edit pages as part of my work on Bug 2152 (multiple stickies). I had this set up so that if the user posts to a community all the sticky options quietly vanished and a little message appeared saying you couldn't sticky entries in communities. Unfortunately, as fu pointed out, administrators can sticky entries in communities.

My problem is I have no idea how to identify a community administrator from jquery.postform.js (which is where I'm controlling this from). Is that possible? If not is there an obvious work around?

If the worst comes to the worst I can always have the message direct people to Organise->Manage Accounts->Display but that wouldn't be optimal.

comments

Easy bug

2013-03-25T03:11:12Z

Posted by: misskat

I was poking through the bugs for something else, and found this: http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4957

To my eye, it looks like it'd be easy for someone moderately familiar with the code base, though I could be TOTALLY wrong. It happens!

Anyway, thought I'd mention that here. :)

Hugs and bunnies,
your favorite Support admin

PS: yes, I totally submitted that suggestion, but that's not (entirely) why I'm posting it here. :)

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Question thread #9

2013-03-09T11:28:42Z

Posted by: pauamma

It's been way too long since the last question thread (why didn't anyone poke me?) so let's have another one!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer.

comments

RFC: organizing the wiki

2013-01-11T02:11:56Z

Posted by: fu

So the wiki, you probably know it. I'd like to get your thoughts on how we can improve it -- if you're new, I'd especially like your thoughts on what you'd find most useful in Dev Getting Started (that was there / wasn't there and you only found by digging elsewhere).

I'd like to have good info in there, enough for someone to be able to start exploring, but not so much that it gets overwhelming with needing to look at everything at once.

I'm closing comments here so the discussion is only in one place, but please comment on my entry re: organizing wiki.

comments