Last week didn’t go actually according to my plans, but I did get some major improvements done. I improved repository metadata handling a lot, the code is much cleaner and should also work better now. I did a great deal of testing on updates handling, it seems to be working now.<\/p>\n
Then I hit two serious problems with MoinMoin: XML-RPC PutPage and path problems. For some reason the MM server process and the man\/info importer process went into some kind of deadlock at random times when running the import. The server was waiting on accept() and the importer on recv(). I tried to do some debugging etc. but I never figured out exactly what was wrong. So I decided to port my importer to use the PageEditor class in Moin. That was a big change, but I’m happy with the result. This also solved the other problems I had with XML-RPC, mainly the mysterious idle times when the importing kind of stalled for 30 seconds per every page import. I suspect all these things have something to do with network\/socket stuff, but I just don’t have the time to start debugging all this when I have more important things to implement here…<\/p>\n
So I gained speed, but I also lost something when getting rid of XML-RPC. Mainly I lost the ability to run the importer and all the man -> DocBook XML etc. conversions on a different host than the actual wiki. But since a single man page import now takes about 0.7 seconds and it took about 30 seconds with XML-RPC, it’s all worth it.<\/p>\n
When doing the porting to PageEditor, I kept having some really weird problems with python import clauses. Simply, many of them didn’t work. I spent about a day trying to find out what was wrong and I eventually even found the reason: A relative path was added to sys.path which caused all the problems, since I had a bit of a different setup than the default. So I fixed it with adding an absolute path instead, which took something like maybe 20 characters of python, after one day of work \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n
In Friday I travelled from my parent’s place to Helsinki, since our student organization visited Assembly<\/a>. That was fun, but I had no Internet access at all from my student apartment at Helsinki during the whole weekend, so any coding I could do was for a couple of hours at Assembly. Thanks a lot Sonera<\/a>! Even with flaky Internet connection, I could work for about 40 hours last week. Btw, iirc, the 4k intro at Assembly was won with Python \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n