Working on Projile: Update and some decisions

Posted by Jacob Santos on June 19, 2011

Well, I caught the Minecraft bug again, so I lost a week to playing that game. It is like crack. Meh, I think I got it out of my system. Really, it has been good because it kept from working on Trac in the wrong way with going forward with bad decisions.

I lack motivation for rewriting Trac and I think that has really kept me from being pumped about doing anything. However, I think what I am going to try to do first is get Trac running and displayed in the browser. The next step I think is slowly refactoring the code base to use CherryPy, but still keep the same directory structure and hopefully everything as it is now.

From what I can see of the controller, it shouldn’t be that difficult to refactor the code base to use CherryPy. I do need to follow the code paths to further understand exactly how the front controller is passing the requests off to the different components. There is some Voodoo magic involved that I need to probably look at from the top-down with actually running Trac. I will need to maintain all of the routes, but I think this will be a good starting point and should be a small enough project, I hope, to get me more involved into the code base of Trac.

I’m still going to do the web installer, but I’m going to take a break. The existing way it is handled, works fine for now. The difficulty level is moderate, so while I still think it is worth investing the time, I really need to get involved in the trenches with Projile code base to get up the motivation to continue.

I need to remember that the reason I’m using Trac is not to fork Trac or create a new project management system. The point is to use an existing project and add features to test some solutions that I’ve been reading and contemplating for the last 2 years. Also, I want to learn Python and an established project is usually the best place to start.

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2 Comments.

  1. mdmadph June 24, 2011 at 3:27 pm

    Just lost the past two weeks of my life to Minecraft as well. Would love to see what this project entails.

    • Jacob Santos July 3, 2011 at 4:35 pm

      The project will conclude with failure. My primary goal has always been to learn Python and I have learned in the past that the best way is often to use an established project to enable rewards sooner. Use the best of the best, but I doubt the project will go anywhere after 2 months. The secondary goal is to try out different theories with project tracking. I think that I’ll be spending majority of my time learning Python and not enough time hacking Trac.

      So far, my time has been split: 70% Minecraft, 20% learning Python and 10% deciding whether I’m going to rewrite Trac using CherryPy and SQLAlchemy porting Trac to Python 3.x verses doing it the right way and hacking the existing Trac. Meh, either way, the project will be scrapped and I’ll hopefully know enough to port the parts that I want to experiment on to a Trac plugin. I also have to move Minecraft back to <20% to actually start getting anywhere.