I spent last weekend in Sunnyvale, CA at the GSoC mentor summit.  This was a great opportunity to rub elbows with a number of experts in various OSS projects.  It was great to make connections with people in and out of the Python community.  First off, I just want to thank Google, and Leslie Hawthorne for having us. Google was an excellent host, and I would jump at the chance to attend a Google-hosted event again.  Google is using GSoC to promote the open source community.  By providing funding for students to work for a summer on software instead of flipping burgers, they hope to save the world, one open source project at a time.  I have my own take on what Google’s true intentions are, but I don’t really want to discuss that in this blog entry.  That is to say, I don’t think Google’s intentions are in any way evil, but they are definitely self-serving.  In any event, it is remarkable the amount of time, energy, and money that goes into this project, which is at this time one of a kind.  Here’s hoping that other companies will consider the not-so-small buy in for sponsorship which could lead to even more OSS development.   

As for the summit itself, there were lots of talks.  Since it was run like an open-space conference, it took a little while to work up some speed the first day, but I never found myself want of something to do.  I was not surprised that the talk on monetizing your OSS project was wildly successful.  I was surprised at how easy it was for sessions to get off on tangents, but it was interesting to see how people in similar fields were solving projects.  I attended a session on Scientific Computing (since I work for NREL) and it seemed that the biggest problem the room faced was packaging/deployment of software.  I appears this problem cross-cuts platforms, language, and even hardware barriers.  It also seems that you either have a choice to make: stick with old software that is stable, or upgrade to new stuff that almost always breaks other things.  Sound familiar?  I wonder how long it will be before everyone runs isolated virtual machine images for each of their projects… I bet some already are.  

By day two I was pretty exhausted of participating in sessions, and I just wanted to hack with some like-minded folks.  It turned out that at least 8 people at the summit were hacking on making their application run on Python 2.6, so we all got together and shared the good vibe while we solved our individual problems.  The main barrier for TurboGears 2 running on Python 2.6 was ToscaWidgets and TurboJson.  First off, peak-rules needed some minor tweaking to get a few of the bugs fixed.  Thanks to Philip Eby for implementing my patch (in a slightly different way) and making it all work.  ToscaWidgets was also breaking with the SimpleJson trunk, but this turned out to be an implementation error, and I think I have it mostly sorted out.  

Yesterday evening Mark and I finished up packaging the !first beta! of Turbogears2.  I put a few custom eggs in the index from my GSoC hacking, and suddenly we have a Python 2.6 compatible release.  Also, of interesting note Gustavo Narea cranked out tgext.authorization which handles most of the security for TurboGears2.  Now I just need to get cranking and fix DBSprockets Primitives to work with Rum, and then fix silverplate to support Rum also.  (Perhaps this is my way of telling people to move in the Rum direction).  

Mark and I will be attending PyWorks in November, and doing a sprint then.  So, if you are in town, or interested in sprinting remotely, please don’t hesitate to sign up.  I will be speaking at PyWorks on using PasteScript, Virtualenv, SQLAlchemy, and Nosetests to create robust database applications. Do you think there is anything else I could cram in a 45 minute talk?  I will also be helping Mark out at his TG2 tutorial, so if you aren’t signed up for PyWorks, get crackin’ !