After the Confoo.ca conference, Yannick Gingras from the Montreal Python user group organized two

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="343" caption="Sprinting on TurboGears 2"][][][/caption]

small sprints at the Brasseurs Numériques headquarters (Digital Brewers). Yannick's company is called like that because he brews his own beers ! As a matter of fact, he prepared a beer for the sprints, that was really good (and quite strong.). His beer would probably beat some good Belgium beers on a blind test.

Sprint #1 : Turbogears

Chris Perkins led a Turbogears sprint Saturday. I am not very familiar with this framework but I am using Pylons a lot, and its the basis of Turbogears. Alice Bevan-McGregor was present, and could confront his ideas on web frameworkery with Chris since he created his own tool : WebCore. I've heard that they worked on making the Turbogears dispatcher a standalone library so it could be used by both frameworks.

I worked on my side on small packaging issues TG has. We fixed the latest TG 2.x beta custom package index that was broken (it was generating incomprehensible errors when installing TG, and I found out that the index pages in the TG PyPI were broken)

Next, I've added to easy_install a --no-find-links option to prevent links added by projects in their setup.cfg. This will prevent projects like Pylons to implicitely add links that easy_install reads. The effect is that some old version of some packages like nose were installed. This is not released yet.

If you were present to the sprint, please comment to tell us what you've done !

EDIT: Chris added more details on the TG sprint -- see the comments

Sprint #2 : Packaging

Monday evening we worked on packaging issues. I started the sprint by presenting the current state of packaging on a board. That took quite a while because it is not obvious to understand the packaging eco-system (distutils, setuptools, distutils2 and pip.).

Then I've listed possible tasks and people started to work.
- Yannick Gingras worked a bit on the Hitchicker's Guide to Packaging then worked on Distribute on Issue #133. - Ahmed Al-Saadi was pretty new to packaging so he worked on the guide and tried to catch up with the state of packaging (that's a real work :) ) - Alexandre Vassaloti worked on porting distutils2 into Python3. So basically, like Distribute, Distutils2 will be installable on Python 2 and 3, using the same source tree, and a 2to3 call upon installation. - Nicolas Cadou worked on PEP 345 support. He created a sample project that will be used in a functional test to validate that everything works. He eventually fixed some code in Distutils2 so it works with the PEP 345 DistributionMetadata class I've built during Pycon. I need to merge his work asap. - Matthieu Leduc-Hammel worked with me on PEP 345 support for PyPI. I've changed the postgres database to add the new fields, and Matthieu worked on PyPI UI. For instance, you will have a nice box on the project pages now that displays links from the Project-URL metadata field. I need to merge his work asap.

As a global note: Mercurial was the perfect tool for this sprint. I am able to merge people work in Distutils2 and other projects without all the repository access issues we usually get when we start a sprint. I am looking forward for a full Mercurial switch of Python, because this will boost contributions.

Thanks Yannick, Nicolas for the Sprint and the Beer ! Thanks Ubity for sponsoring the Packaging sprint with pizzas ! (they are looking for developers btw)

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