Question thread #3

[pauamma]

It's time for another question thread!

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

Testing

[randomling]

Hi!

So I'm working on Bug 2886, and I've reached the point (with lots of help!) where I MIGHT have a working patch. And now I need to test it.

And I'm kind of stuck, to be honest.

How do I go about designing a testing plan for a bug like this? What kind of use cases do I need to take into account?

Thanks, guys!

[snakeling]

Still working on my script to post Pinboard bookmarks to Dreamwidth. (And much thanks to both you and foxfirefey for your answers last time. I completely forgot to get back at you, my bad entirely. I'll try to be better this time :) )

I'm stuck on, I think, a fairly easy question, that I nevertheless can't find an answer to.

To use the Dreamwidth API (and the Pinboard one), I need the user's password. My script is PHP, and I tell people installing it to do so outside of the public folders, to reduce problems, but even though, I'm not particularly happy at having to store the password, not even encrypted, in the script. Everything I can find about storing passwords securely is about sites that ask you to login, but I do the opposite: I send the password outside. (Unless I'm a dunce and there is a totally different solution I didn't think of.)

I need to store the script on a web server, because the point is for it to run automatically without human input.

Anyone has the beginning of a solution for me?

[chagrined]

I am only newly poking at the DW code and am new to most of this. I don't have enough understanding yet to ask interesting questions. But here is an uninteresting question I have about something!

In cgi-bin/bml/scheme/global.look, this is line 171:
GRIN=>{S}<grin>

Does that actually serve a purpose somewhere? It seems like all <?GRIN?> would do if used in a BML document is cause <grin> to print, which then wouldn't show up to the user, but wouldn't do anything else either. Is this just a silly programming easter egg of some kind, or does this actually do something I'm not seeing? (I also did a rgrep and couldn't find <?GRIN?> occurring anywhere.) eta: Oh, wait. I'm realizing now it'd make &lt;grin&gt; print, not <grin>. So the user would indeed see <grin>, I guess?

[chagrined]

Another question! I am poking at MoodThemeChooser.pm (and other things) in an attempt to change out places where tables were used for layout purposes, to use CSS positioning instead. In MoodThemeChooser.pm there is this variable $moodtheme_extra which takes its value somehow from the hook mood_theme_extra_content? And then another variable $show_special which is set based on that? (I am still just trying to figure out Perl, lol.) ANYWAY. I cannot figure out where mood_theme_extra_content comes from or what it is supposed to signify. I read the wiki page on hooks and the old LJ documentation on them but I'm still confused. And I did an rgrep search but couldn't find mood_theme_extra_content anywhere else. It's making me scratch my head, b/c I can't figure out how I should change the CSS version of the layout in relation to this element.

As far as I can tell, with the table, what it changes is that if $moodtheme_extra is false, then all the example "mood theme" images/descriptions (which are contained in <td> elements) are in ONE row. If $moodtheme_extra is true, then after every 2nd image it inserts a new <tr>. But not knowing what the heck mood_theme_extra_content is, I don't know why it's doing that or whether I should also do that. I wasn't sure also if maybe this is related to the width of the table, b/c I just told my CSS positioning to size the width of that element automatically, but ...if mood_theme_extra_content is related to mood themes that are extra super wide or something, maybe that is why it happened? (I'm positioning those elements with float:left so I could just add in a clear:left probably to the same effect.) (eta: or set a maximum width to the containing element to eliminate the need for this workaround?)

Anyway, confusion. I figure also for testing purposes it's important to know what that hook means so I can test the two different cases. On that end, also, I guess I have another question. How do I make a user account in my dreamhack a "paid account" so I can test paid features? Maybe there is an obvious answer to this somewhere but I couldn't find it on the wiki.

[chagrined]

I'm baaaaaaaaaaaack?

Thanks to denise's response to my question I was able to figure out the hooks in MoodThemeChooser.pm and now I think I have a version that correctly uses CSS positioning. Only then I tried to figure out how to generate a patch and got totally lost. I tried to follow the instructions on the wiki for maintenance/syncing my CVS installation/whatever first. Okay. But from what I can gather ...the instructions on patching on most of those pages assume I was doing my edits in the CVS directory and generating patches as I went along? Now I'm just lost and frustrated. One of the "getting started" pages on the wiki said that you could do your editing in either the live directory or in the CVS directories and that it had something to do with personal preference for workflow? So I did it in the live directory but now can't figure out how to get THAT to sync with my CVS directory. The problem is that I did change files other than MoodThemeChooser.pm, so when I generated a "compare everything" patch it had a lot of other changes I don't want to include in this patch. But I don't want to JUST declare MoodThemeChooser.pm b/c I also changed the files governing the CSS rules for that page (in both htdocs and ssldocs). So I guess I could generate three separate patches, one for each of those files, but that seems annoying, and then if I had more than three files could get old really soon.

I backed up the other files in my live directory that I changed anyway so that's why I wanted to just sync/override the whole thing, then I could copy my modified MoodThemeChooser.pm & related files back in there to only generate the patch based on those. Also though when I did the patch comparing everything in my live directory with the CVS one, there was a lot of weird stuff in there I definitely didn't change, like, config files related to ...time and things like that? (I don't have the patch file in front of me right now).

Uh basically I'm just confused and frustrated and wondering whether it's best to wipe my entire installation, reset it from scratch and then try to figure out this other method of doing my edits in the CVS directory instead? (And then I use patches to make those edits apply to the live directory so I can see them when I go to the site or something? Is that how that works?)

[ninetydegrees]

I have one! How do you get the new update page on one's hack?

[farasha]

Hi!

If one were interested in getting involved in bugfixes and development, but one's only code experience is outdated (HTML 3.0 and Java a few versions ago), which languages would you lovely people suggest one brushes up on?