Installing Entertainer 0.1

Edit: Since lots of files moved around after the 0.1 release, I’ve listed better instructions on the launchpad site by answering my own question. Please check that link instead of using this blog post.

Only two bugs that we (the Entertainer developers) targeted for our 0.1 milestone missed the release deadline. Unfortunately, both of these missed bugs (Bug 232365 ‘provide a PPA respository for hardy’ and Bug 236271 ‘Need a simple pdf guide for new users’) have fairly big consequences for people who are trying to get Entertainer up and running for the first time.

Since the whole reason we released early was to get some good testers and users, this is a notable failing on our part. Sorry. We don’t want to leave anyone out, so here are some basic steps to get started.

1. Get all the required dependencies (these are supporting code libraries that help make Entertainer work). You can use the list at our old Google Code page. Please ask us on IRC (irc.freenode.net #entertainer) if you seem to be missing something. This problem will be rectified when we have a package that users can install (so that the dependencies will automatically be grabbed).

2. Get the release and extract the compressed file. You can use graphical tools (e.g., right click the file in Ubuntu and select Extract) or practice your command line foo (e.g., `matt@zion:~/Desktop/$ tar -xvzf entertainer-0.1.tar.gz`)

3. Point to your media with the content management tool. In a terminal window, from within the src directory of the release that you just extracted, execute `./entertainer-content-management.py`.

4. Start the backend, which will index all your selected media directories, from within the src directory by executing `./entertainer-backend.py`.

5. Start the frontend (the whole reason you went through these instructions) by executing `./entertainer-frontend.py`.

6. Report bugs on our Launchpad site (help us make Entertainer better!).

I hope these instructions will help you enjoy Entertainer.

Entertainer Media Center 0.1 is released into the wild!

As an Entertainer Developer, I’m very proud to get our first big release out the door! 0.1 is the culmination of a lot of hard work over the past few weeks months.

It’s quite a feat to develop and release software and the effort was only made possible by the hard work of Jamie Bennett, Michael Charclo, Paul Hummer, Joshua Scotton, Lauri Taimila, and myself, our helpful bug reporters and alpha testers, and some great development tools like launchpad, bazaar, and pylint.

Since this is my first release experience as a part of an open source, community driven team, this code will probably be special to me, warts and all. I want to thank all the guys listed above for their help in making me a better developer and answering my (sometimes foolish) questions. I think we have a good community growing here and I’m looking forward to many more releases in the future.

Download the release here.

.1 is coming! .1 is coming!

The Entertainer developers have scheduled our first release for June 14th. As with lots of other open source projects, our .1 release is meant to be a preview release to get the software out to many users and get feedback, testing, questions, and, of course, new bug reports.

As you can see from our bugs list for milestone .1 (found here), we are getting very close to fixing all the things we committed to for this release. There will still be some big known issues (like a black blank screen for some/all 64 bit users), but we think that release early and often is good idea and will help us refine Entertainer to be an even better media center.

Keep your eyes peeled for release information from our launchpad page or from the development mailing list (entertainer-dev (at) lists (dot) ironlionsoftware (dot) com).

Code cleanup with pylint

Entertainer is at a coding crossroads. Lauri has done a great job of showing Entertainer as a viable (and beautiful) media center software. However, a portion of this code is more like prototype code than production code (probably since Lauri is fairly new to python like myself). Eventually, this code would become a big maintenance issue. We can either continue to build upon some weak design areas or break things down and refactor into something better. We chosen the latter option.

The developers are attacking this issue on two fronts. First, Paul is overhauling the backend to use an ORM (Object-relational Mapping) that will consolidate the SQL code. This ORM will make the backend look more like an object than a database from the frontend code’s perspective. Secondly, we are using a source code analyzer on the frontend to report a gauntlet of possible problems. This analyzer is called pylint.

Pylint analyzes source code using a rules file specifically tailored to the style of the project. Entertainer is trying to adhere to PEP 8 (Python Enhancement Proposal 8 - Style Guide for Python Code) so we use a pylint rules file that attempts to follow that guideline. Pylint is very easy to use and the following is an example of how to run it:

matt@zion:~/branches/transitions-cleanup/src$ pylint —rcfile=pylintrc frontend/gui/transitions/fade_transition.py

In this example, we do three things: Call pylint, set the rules files (pylintrc), and specify the source file (fade_transition.py). I ran this command in the source directory so that pylint could find the modules that are listed in fade_transition.py. If I had run it in the transitions directory, I might have had import errors because some modules would not be seen in the python path. After running the command, pylint will report any errors, refactorings, warnings, or convention problems it can find, and it will generate a score from 0.00 to 10.00. How cool is that!? It takes so much pain out of debugging potentially unknown problems.

In my opinion, pylint has a great feature about its reporting that makes this cleanup fun: It remembers previous runs and shows side by side comparison of run metrics! I can make changes to the file, run the pylint command in another terminal and watch my checklist of problems shrink and the score go up. I continue this iterative process to get the satisfaction of standardizing a file to goals of the project.

Is pylint worth it? You bet it is. People make mistakes when coding. There are no perfect programmers. The difference I see is that smart programmers will take advantage of tools like pylint to make life simpler and code cleaner.

Entertainer’s May Sprint

Entertainer will be sprinting tomorrow and Sunday!

I think we’ve really settled into our new / not-so-new home on Launchpad. From Launchpad/Bazaar to Google Code/SVN to Launchpad/Bazaar again, we’re committed to use modern version control practices with Bazaar’s distributed version control, and we believe that Launchpad is the right tool for encouraging developer sharing. Launchpad has a lot to offer as it effectively manages the complexity of tying distributed version control with bug reports and features requests, and we want to make the most of that.

As for this sprint, I think the big push will be to land Paul’s Object Relational Model (ORM) in the trunk, and to replace our somewhat unwieldy database code with cleaner object interfaces from the ORM. Coupled with an initiative to use pylint to enforce good Python practices and standards, and unit testing for handling change, the codebase will really start to shape up as we move to a .1 release of Entertainer.

With some new recent contributors, Entertainer is really building up some momentum that will hopefully carry us far beyond this weekend’s sprint. Come join us tomorrow on IRC at #entertainer on irc.freenode.net and let us know if you can help out. I’m sure that there will be plenty to do.

Scatterbrained development

Quite a few days have passed since any of the development team of Entertainer has committed changes to the trunk. I understand that everyone gets busy at times so there could be any number of reasons why things seem a little slow with Entertainer, but I thought I’d explain what I’ve been up to (aside from normal life events that pull me away from my computer).

I think I’ve been spinning my wheels, and I’ve been spinning my wheels because I’m trying too many different things. I’m pretty new to the open source development world, and there are tons of things to learn. I find myself exploring python, clutter, GTK+, glade, blogging, django, unit testing, etc. All of these things are great in their own right, but it’s distracting and I’m not getting my hands dirty with coding as much as I could or should. I just finished listening to MacBreak Weekly on TWIT, and Patrick Wilson, the drummer for Weezer, made an interesting comment about being “a mile wide, and one inch deep.” Eventually, I’d love to have a deep understanding of everything and be a mile wide and a mile deep, but for now, I think I’m going to scale back my exploration and focus on getting deeper with stuff.

I intend to shift my focus from trying to understand all of Entertainer now, to understanding the core by fleshing the testing framework with more unit testing code. I’ll finish up my issues that I accepted from our google code change tracker, and get to work on expanding test coverage.

In the future, when I’m more comfortable with my python skills and how the Entertainer source code functions, I may jump back into some other topics of interest (like clutter and how we intend to package our software). So, my advice to budding open source developers? Get out there and get a full feel for the field, but don’t get sucked into long winded tangents.