Installing Entertainer 0.3

My previous post on installing Entertainer proved to be quite popular. Since quite a bit has changed in Entertainer between 0.1 and 0.3, I’ve decided it would be worth writing the instructions again to prevent confusion. However, for the benefit of people who never see my blog but will visit Entertainer’s Lauchpad page, I have decided to provide the instructions as a FAQ in the team’s Answers section.

Please visit the FAQ for how to install Entertainer 0.3. My apologies for the redirection, but it is for the benefit of many.

On Translations

What!? I have a blog!? I guess I should say something.

I recently worked on improving the translations workflow for Entertainer, and hopefully this work will help make Entertainer rock for i18n (which is short for internationalization in the global community because the word is very long, 18 letters long, to be exact).

In the last Entertainer release (0.2), Joshua Scotton did the trailblazing work of adding gettext support to Entertainer. Gettext is a very common method of making an application translatable. For every string that a user sees in the interface, we wrap that string with the _() method in the code. For example, we might have a line that says:

print _(“Hello”)

Entertainer developers could then run a series of commands that will tell gettext to look for the _() method and extract the contents of all method instances it finds into a file called a po template (pot file for short). We upload this pot file to Launchpad translations, which enables our translators to translate the language into their native tongue.

Launchpad lets translators work through a web interface to see a string from the code so they can provide the translation. Optionally, Launchpad will let a translator download the file that contains the mapping from the reference language to the destination language. This file is called a po file. Once the translator updates the po file, they can upload it back to update the translations in Launchpad.

Josh did a great job adding this initial support for translations, but unfortunately, the team dropped the ball on keeping them up-to-date. Since code continues to change, one can deduce that the strings that a user will see will also change over time. Some strings are deleted. Some strings have wording changes. Other strings are added. For technical reasons not worth enumerating, the developers lacked a super simple way to generate a new pot file and upload that file to launchpad to keep the translators in sync with what is happening in the trunk. Because it was non-trivial to update the pot file, our pot file was out of sync with the code for four months. Four months! On a project that is changing as rapidly as Entertainer, that is a very long time.

My recent translation work provides the simple solution that the developers needed. Now, by simply typing `make translations` in a bzr branch of Entertainer, a new pot file will be generated for a developer to upload to Launchpad. With this change, the development team will be much better equipped to provide steady updates to the translators.

If you’re interested in translating for Entertainer, jump over to our Launchpad translations and give us a hand in making Entertainer useful for whatever language you speak. It’s a great way to contribute, especially if coding is not your thing.

Coming Soon, Entertainer 0.2

Yeah, yeah, we missed our milestone deadline of 9-26-08, but we’re close to getting 0.2 finished.

For those of you looking for a lot of new flashiness and cool user interface features, I’m afraid 0.2 won’t have a ton to offer. With some contributions from new developers, we have added some features like a photo slideshow capability and a quit screen.

Most of our core developers, however, have been focusing on a lot of code refactoring under the hood. In the long term this refactoring will enable us to get features done more quickly and in a testable way, so we can verify everything we code. About 95% of my work for this release probably falls into this category, so I’m afraid I can’t really boast about anything visible that I’ve done this time around. I did fix some text jaggies on some of the menus (*yawn*, boring, I know).

Before you go away sulking from the lack of new bling, take heart at some of the cool things that we have done:

• Thanks to Josh and the efforts of some other contributors, Entertainer has support for language translations! I, unfortunately, am a bum American who can only speak English (and a bit of very broken Spanish), but many other people will be able to enjoy Entertainer in their native language. Our translation page indicates that we have 100% translation of English, French, German, and Swedish. We also have partials translations in plenty of others. That rocks! I’m sure we’ll have to start focusing on translation quality in the future since there are no restrictions on who can translate, but, hey, it’s a pretty good start.
• Paul is dangerously close to getting a package put together. This is great news for users because it will mean that you can install Entertainer from a package in one of launchpad’s Personal Package Archives (PPA). For Ubuntu/Debian users, this will mean no more need to download the source code and run Entertainer directly from source. For non-Ubuntu/Debian users, we have will have a source package that can be used for your distro packaging (anybody willing to step up to the plate?). I think we’ll have a lot of polishing to do, but I am pumped about this because it should open the doors for a lot of users who were scared of running Entertainer from our source tree.

I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that we release 0.2 this weekend (the 4th and 5th). Keep your eyes on this space or over at our launchpad page for official announcements. I’ll also write a post about how to install 0.2 later which will hopefully include instructions about how to install from a PPA.

Installing Entertainer 0.1

Edit: These instructions are really dated and 0.1 is not supported any more. If you came here looking for information on installing Entertainer, please check Installing Entertainer 0.3 or visit Entertainer’s Launchpad site.

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.

>>> print “Hello World!”

This is my first blog post, and since it’s my first post, I’d like to explain the purpose of my blog. My great adventure into the blogosphere will probably have a distinctive slant toward all things Python. I intend to journal my experience with my involvement on the Entertainer Media Center project. Entertainer is written in Python, a dynamically typed language that I’ve spent some time with over the last couple of months.

As someone who uses Perl for development in his day job, my brief impression of Python is amazement at its elegance and readability. Python has already showed me how easy stuff like unit testing and Test Driven Development can be. But that’s a subject for another post. I don’t want to drone on already, so I’ll stop here.

Thanks for reading.