SàT progress note 2019-W28

goffi 5 years ago jabber-xmpp-en SàT project libre SàT progress

Hello,

remember last week when I was mentioning external things that I've put on hold? There was a Twisted ticket that I've opened months ago, I've made a pull request for that, but there was still some changes to do according to review.

Unfortunately, between my paid job, work on SàT, and real life things I haven't had the time to update it, and little after sending my last week note, I've got an email notification about the ticket being fixed (with a patch replacing mine). I was feeling a bit bad to let this for months and not finding the time to update it myself (in 8 months). Fortunately Twisted folks are nice and understand well ("No need to apologize. We're all volunteers here :)"), and it's a good thing that they managed to fix this issue.

I'm telling this because people don't always understand why things take time (why the release it taking so long? Why nobody did review my merge request?), or may be forgotten. It's just that people can be really really busy, and in free software communities, many of them work on their free time.

During this week, again, it was debugging: really useful for the project, but not so much to tell or explain. The blocker list is getting really low, and I feel fairly optimistic that release can be done next week.

There is maybe one issue I've come through that may worth a mention : while the new chat page of Libervia was working fine during my tests on localhost, it was not working at all once deployed. This is a really simple chat for now, just a proof of concept before adding advanced feature in next version. Libervia pages which come with the new web framework are currently mostly static (i.e. there is no advanced javascript to handle complex changes, this will come in next version), and the chat works by establishing a websocket with the pages, and just sending new messages to display. The web framework is supposed to make life of developer easier, and you only have to declare a dynamic = True variable to activate the websocket. In the background, Libervia create the websocket, associate the page with it, and also the request which is an object containing many useful data, including the session with the profile of the user.

While investigating, I've realised that the issue was happening only in HTTPS, so it was not visible while working on http://localhost. Happily, I'm now working mostly in HTTPS even during local development, this make the detection of this kind of issues easier. I've been using mkcert which makes the process of adding personal certificate painless, and thanks to it I can work easily in HTTPS on my own private and local domain.

This led to an issue with the request object I was storing. This Twisted object is not made to be stored this way, but I was doing it to keep the useful data it contains. Once the HTTP GET request used to retrieve the chat page is finished, the channel is closed, and it is used to test if the request is secure or not (the Twisted session is not stored in the same object or using the same cookie if the request is secured or not). As a result I was getting an empty session, like if the user was not connected, and the chat could not work. I could easily work around this issue, and I've reworked this in a cleaner way; it's working fine now.

The release is not totally ready yet, but I'm already thinking about what's coming next (beside Python 3 port), and there are several big options in my mind, it will be important to choose carefully the priorities. I'll probably focus soon on user experience (UX), as current UI (specially for Cagou), is not that intuitive and accessible for newcomers. I'll write more about this for the release note (which may replace next week progress note).

debacle 5 years ago

E

errormovim 4 years ago