[Qa-debsources] [GSoc] Technology Discussion

[Matthieu Caneill]

Hey,

On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 05:36:26PM +0100, Aaron Delaney wrote:
> I've just now moved back to my house and I'm getting setup for regular work
> on Debsources. In this email I'll discuss a few things: meeting times, my
> report plans, work for next week, discussion of frameworks and details
> regarding the Trello board.

Thanks! That's more the kind of input we expected on you. Well done
for getting on track!

> Meetings wise maybe we should start with the regular Tuesday ones? Since
> that
> was somewhat a plan IIRC in the other thread. It's up to yous though, I'll
> be
> working my worktimes around you.

Orestis and myself are fine with Tuesdays. What about 10am CEST/9am
Dublin time? It's the time I'll be the most available.

> On top of meetings I'll be sending out a weekly report to Debian. I plan to
> write these on Saturday and Sunday and have them sent out by Monday. This
> will
> also remind you of the work last week and assist the meeting we have on
> Tuesday.

Great. Don't hesitate to use your reports as a resource for
blogging. Btw, we can federate your blog (or a Debian subsection of
your blog) on planet.debian.org, which is (along with the mailing
lists) a good way to advertise your work to other Debian developers
(but not only).

> ### Proposed Work for the 23rd May -> 29th May
> 
> Prototype the initial view of the dynamic grid version of debsources. The
> homepage, the navigational features. Work will be done from most general or
> often seen to smaller more specific parts of the rendering.

ACK.

> This of course requires us to make an initial choice on responsive
> frameworks.
> Refer to my research in the last email, I propose that I initially start
> with
> flow as opposed to bootstrap. Do provide input into this please :)

What's flow? You never mentioned it. The only framework that seemed
to make a difference was Bootstrap.

> I will not be able to work on the 24th of May as my final Uni commitment,
> the
> final year project expo, is on, and I've to show face. Thanks for your
> patience
> thus far, I appreciate it.

Ok. Would you still be available in the morning for the meeting? If
not I propose wednesday, same time.

> I will also need to work on the research for the SPA frameworks. I haven't
> got
> as thorough an understanding on different data models as I would like. In
> frameworks like these, you tend to see very specific ways of looking at the
> way
> data moves around the application.
> 
> ### Discussion of Single Page App
> 
> > Yes: the fact a library is packaged or not in Debian is also an
> important point to consider.
> 
> This is a good point and something I wasn't thinking about until I read that
> email. From what I see react does NOT have a debian package. The popular
> SPA frameworks in jessie are: [AngularJS](https://angularjs.org/) and
> [Backbone.js](http://backbonejs.org/).
> 
> I will lean towards something that just minimizes update and event logic.
> That's very slow development wise and is one of the big issues these
> frameworks
> set out to solve.
> 
> I will compare and contrast these libraries with regards to development on
> debsources this week as part of my work plan. I may blog it -- as well
> as being included in my email to the GSoc Debian Coordinators.

Ok. Let me add a constraint here. Using a library shouldn't make
people without javascript unable to see the content. So the content
must be present somehow without javascript, and the links must fall
back to regular links when the framework can't ajax the data.

If that is not possible, we will discuss how we can have a second way
to browse debsources, be it a mobile version or app. But the html-only
way will keep working.

FWIW, it is the same with libraries such as Bootstrap. While its
javascript can be used, it must not prevent jsless users to navigate
the site. Same for the css, but that should be easier. Try to navigate
the pages you build with a text-based browser such as lynx, to be
sure they are still working well without all the css/js.

> ### Regarding the Trello board
> 
> Later this evening I will attend to updating the Trello board to make it up
> to
> date with the information in the email. orestis gave me some tips but more
> would be appreciated!

IIRC Orestis told you to have more fine-grained tasks, which I
second. I can see you took it into account, nice :)
What does
- adding css framework to foo
- fix tests for foo
mean?
In general, when you add a feature, the tests and the doc *are part
of* the feature. Making it 100% work should only be one item.

I took the liberty to move some of your items in the "This week"
list. A goal for this week could be: have the css rendering library
included in the html, and render the Debian parts of the website with
it. The Debian part of the website are the elements that are styled
with the debian.css file, and are the same on all Debian
websites. Look at the menu, the footer, the logo, etc. Please don't
change how they look like, but rather focus on making them mobile
compliant.

>From this on we'll be able to keep switching the content part of the
site to the css library.

We'd like to see your code often, if not everyday. As we went for
Github, I encourage you to push your commits to branches that we can
review even before you make PRs.

Divide your contributions into small commits that we can easily test,
understand, merge and deploy. We'd like to regularly push your work to
sources.debian.net, for at least two reasons: keep a functioning
master branch that deploys, and show your work to Debian/GSoC/other
people, who might as well give feedback.

Keep us in touch of what you do on irc, which is also suitable for
quick questions. But keep using emails for longer discussions that we
might want to refer to later. This one was great.

Cheers,
and good luck for the first weeek! Happy to work with you towards
billions of lines of code viewable from hundreds of million mobile
devices :)
--
Matthieu