TurboGears October 2005 Mad Dash (Sprint)
by Kevin Dangoor
Today, we had the first TurboGears Mad Dash. I figured that calling it a “sprint” is probably not accurate, given that most sprints last several times the length of today’s mad dash.
Including myself, we had 10 participants. Given that I had announced my desire to hold a sprint just a few days after TurboGears’ public release, the turnout was very good. Most of the people there were members of michipug (including two that I hadn’t met before), and we also had two hearty travelers from Cleveland.
I thought the day went well! Given that TurboGears is a three-week-old project (built on much older projects, of course), I hadn’t expected that we were going to generate thousands of lines of code (and we didn’t, of course). But, I had expected that people would get a chance to dive in a bit and learn what makes things tick and to collaborate and generate ideas.
On those counts, the day was exactly what I had hoped for. We’ve got some good direction planned for some TurboGears’ 0.9 features, and 9 more people have now had some experience working inside various parts of TurboGears. We also spotted a bug in the forthcoming 0.8 release… it’s always a bonus to be able to stop a bug before the software ships.
A few people expressed interest in doing another sprint, possibly for a longer time than this one (less mad dash-like). The next one will also get moving faster, given that people have more familiarity than they did before. On IRC yesterday, there was talk about a “remote sprint”, which sounds a bit trickier to pull off. We’ll have to see about the remote one, but I’m sure there will be another Ann Arbor in person sprint sometime in the not-too-distant future.
It was a very good time
At the very least we have started to build a small core of more knowledgeable TurboGears developers. I learned quite a bit about the internals of TurboGears (especially Kid) and the development process. Thanks for providing the great opportunity (and snacks and lunch 
) I am looking forward to the next one…
What are the plans for Kid? I looked at the Kid Website and saw that they are on 0.6.4 and have said that they are not going to have a stable system until 1.0. is TG going to keep pace with the changes in Kid or are you all going to fork it to meet your needs as those needs change so that TG remains stable as far as templates go.
oh, yeah I wanted to know…
who is writing the O’Reily book and when is it coming out
While I do have commit access to the repository, unfortunately I don’t have access to fix the Kid site… Ryan Tomayko, Kid’s author, has put together a fairly simple roadmap to 1.0. Despite the dire warnings on the Kid website, Kid is not going to undergo gigantic syntax changes between now and 1.0.
Beyond that, part of the TurboGears appeal is stability and predictability in the overall suite. That means that if you’re running TurboGears 1.0, you can confidently move to 1.0.1 and expect things to work. And, you can also know that moving to 1.1 things will likely work just fine and any compatibility issues will be well-documented and hopefully very easy to deal with.
Generally speaking, that shouldn’t be too hard to achieve. But, that is part of the deal… unless you’re really interested, you don’t have to care about what happens with Kid between 0.6.4 and 1.0. Just follow TurboGears and you’ll be fine.
and, I’d love to see that O’Reilly book too
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